Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning Social Security, clean air and water, and intravenous fertilization.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security by taxing the rich more, and pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and the Right to IVF Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to protect and expand Social Security by taxing the rich a lot harder than we’re doing now. Everything your right-wing uncle loves about America – good-paying jobs and benefits for working families, a neighborhood where you didn’t have to lock your doors at night – came about not because “we let big business innovate” but because we taxed the fuck out of the rich in the middle of the 20th century. And your right-wing uncle loves Social Security, too, even if he professes to “hate” socialism – and we could start taxing income over $168,600 into the system and make it pay out more in benefits. So how about we do all of that?

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and thus end tax breaks for oil and gas-producing corporations. Your right-wing uncle hates people on welfare, right? Then why doesn’t he hate big oil and gas corporations that get over $17 billion annually in corporate welfare from the taxpayer (including him!) when the three biggest oil and gas corporations in America made $85 billion in profits in 2023? Surely your right-wing uncle can think of better things to do with $17 billion – like, you know, fund infrastructure projects that create jobs. Your right-wing uncle should call his Congressfolk! But we should also do that.

Finally, Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Right to IVF Act, which would (as its title suggests!) protect intra-venous fertilization (or IVF) by establishing a statutory right to IVF access and compelling Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance corporations to cover IVF. You kinda have to do both, after all – as we are experiencing far more than we deserve right now, a “right” to health care means very little if you can’t actually afford health care. We’d be a lot better off if Medicare provided all of our health insurance needs; then we could apply pressure to keep costs down a lot more effectively than we can now. But this bill will do some good, so we should pass it.

Action: concerning domestic spending, polluter welfare, and Congressional stock trading.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject arbitrary spending caps on domestic spending, and pass the End Polluter Welfare Act and the ETHICS Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject arbitrary spending caps on domestic spending. Republicans made a deal with President Biden on domestic spending, but now they’re trying to go lower. They must think they’re Darth Vader! I am altering the deal; pray I do not alter it again. Republicans plan to cut Department of Transportation spending by 10% – just as Pete Buttigieg is starting to do his job! – and want to cut Labor, HHS, and Education by similar levels; these departments run programs that actually help good Americans, so let’s put a stop to these shenanigans.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act, which would (as its title suggests!) repeal all sorts of tax breaks that big oil and gas corporations get. Those tax breaks might have made sense once, while these industries were getting started, but they don’t make any sense now that they’re well-established, and they make a lot less sense when you consider that they’ve not only turbocharged climate change but they’ve also lied about it – about both doing it and knowing they were doing it. Have I mentioned I love the use of the world “welfare” in this bill’s title? Turn their words against them, that’s what I say.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the ETHICS Act, which would ban Congressfolk from trading in stocks. Now, to far too many folks addled by four decades of right-wing rule, that will seem laugh-worthy – who’s gonna pass a bill preventing themselves from investing in stocks ha ha ha snort look at me I’m so smart! These folks, despite my ministry and that of others, still do not get that Congressfolk exist to serve the American people, not enrich themselves, and we can’t trust that Congressfolk who legislate about corporate conduct but have investments in corporations would ever put their self-interest aside. We may be optimists, but we’re not fools.

Action: concerning health care, fracking, and climate change.

Long story short: tell our government your story (if you have one) about how Medicare Advantage plans harmed you, and tell our government to reject plans to frack on public lands and investigate big oil’s well-documented lies to the American people about their role in climate change. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Attention, those who’ve been harmed by Medicare Advantage plans: More Perfect Union helps you tell our Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (or CMS) your story of how a Medicare Advantage plan harmed you. I’m pleased the Biden Administration wants to collect these stories, since they’ve otherwise acted far too sanguine about the presence of private health insurance corporations sucking out Medicare money (which, ah, is your money, both coming and going). Stories they’ll want to hear may include denied claims, denied treatments, surprise medical bills, and misleading advertising – you know, all the noxious crap you’d expect from total greedheads who will burn in everlasting Hellfire but hurt or kill millions of good Americans first.

Civic Shout helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to reject its proposal to open 40,000 acres of the Wayne National Forest to fracking and oil drilling. Fracking will make your water undrinkable – it’s why Pennsylvania state Republicans from the Philadelphia suburbs got a fracking moratorium in the 2012 state budget – and our public lands have plenty of water in them. Don’t brook any stupidity from right-wingers about the need for “cheap energy,” particularly if they then turn and lie about how you can never get solar power on a cloudy day. “Have you heard of the miracle technology called battery storage?” All these right-wingers really care about is making sure energy corporation executives still get to redistribute their workers’ income upward to themselves, so don’t abide their BS.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell our Justice Department to investigate big oil corporations for knowing they were helping cause climate change for decades but lying to us about it the whole time. This story is almost a decade old already, and no oil corporation executives are in jail yet; I know the wheels of justice grind slowly, but does that really comfort anyone who can’t get a drink of clean water or spends hundreds of dollars every month just to keep their house cool? The time for justice is always now. And I know, there’s always the chance that a Justice Department lawsuit will get before a federal judge who thinks corporations have a “right” to lie. Fact is corporations don’t have a right to do a God-damned thing, because corporations aren’t people, they’re things, and letting things rule you is always a fatal mistake.

Action: concerning stock buybacks, corporate welfare, wind power, and tax cuts for the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, and the NOW Act, and tell your Congressfolk to let the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax “reform” expire. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Inequality Media helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Stock Buyback Accountability Act, which would raise the 1% stock buyback tax (enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022) with a 4% tax, which would, I would think, be at least four times as effective in discouraging stock buybacks, which used to be illegal, because they concentrated shareholder power in fewer and fewer hands, but now are as big a blot on our economy as the hedge fund or the monthly stock report. You know it’s always the folks who already have too much money (i.e., executives) who buy back the most stock, but the Stock Buyback Accountability Act would help make shareholders relevant again.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act, which would restore the 35% corporate tax rate, close loopholes that allow corporations to move money overseas and outsource our jobs, and end, once and for all, the practice of using a Cayman Islands P.O. Box as a “headquarters.” Every year, too many big corporations pay literally nothing in taxes – or, worse, suck tax money out of our very pockets. That’s money that could pay for cops, libraries, and bridges! But the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act would help us get that money for the public investment we deserve, so we should do it.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Nonrestrictive Offshore Wind (or NOW) Act, which would repeal the law (passed, sadly, in the Inflation Reduction Act) mandating that wind power leases can only occur after our government has handed out an offshore oil drilling lease. Hey, it was what Joe Manchin would let happen in 2022! And I’m sure more than a few Americans are still so timid about these “new” renewable energy sources that they don’t mind their development being so closely tied to the further development of “established” energies. But renewables have been around for decades, and really, we don’t need training wheels to use them anymore.

Finally, Patriotic Millionaires also helps you tell your Congressfolk to let the worst parts of the 2017 Trump tax “reform” law expire. That would, sadly, not include the corporate tax rate cut from 35% to 21% (which is why we need the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act described above) but it would include the big tax cuts for the top income tax brackets and the pass-through deductions that somehow only benefit the already-too-rich. Don’t expect a second Trump term to do anything but give bosses more unearned goodies; best that we take action now, and at least reveal to our Congressfolk a will they will have to work to ignore.

Around the table: today with a mere 57% good news.

Our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) discovers that American oil corporations actually colluded with the Saudi Arabian government to raise gas prices, which accounted for about 27% of inflation in 2021 and cost the average American family $3,000 just last year. Not just in higher gas prices, of course, but also in the movement of pretty much any product, since trucks run on gas. But sure, let’s pretend gas price hikes were all about Ukraine and clean air and clean water regulation! And when right-wing morons say our FTC is “out of control,” remember that finding evidence of price-fixing collusion with foreign governments is what they mean by “out of control.”

Biden Administration issues rule requiring minimum staffing requirements in nursing homes for the first time ever. The rule also requires 80% of Medicaid funding to go to nursing home worker salaries, i.e., instead of already-overpaid and overfed executives. The rule will make it harder for big nursing home corporations to keep goosing up profits (and therefore executive and shareholder wealth) by cutting staffing so that nobody in a nursing home can get decent care. So remember that when right-wing morons claim that the Biden Administration rule will “hurt investors” and therefore “close nursing homes,” as if they have never heard of the concept of demand.

Ground breaks on the Brightline West high-speed rail line that would run from Las Vegas to Los Angeles and go as fast as 200 mph; planners expect it’ll be finished in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Now cue the thousands of right-wingers (many of them employed by television networks) who will utter the words “high-speed rail” with a snicker in the hopes that everyone else will just assume high-speed rail must be very silly. No, really, that’s as far as they’ll go to argue against it. The good news? People don’t take them nearly as seriously as they used to. January 6 can do that to a movement.

Biden Administration cancels over $6 billion in student loan debt for over 300,000 students who attended one of the many Art Institutes across America between January of 2004 and October of 2017. Now cue the thousands of right-wingers who will squeal HAHAHAHA ART STUDENTZ AREZ SOZ TEH STUPIDZ!!!!!, though of course the real problem here is that the Art Institute lied to its students about what their job prospects would be if they attended the school. Why, they even inflated average salaries by including that of Serena Williams, who attended an Art Institute for a few terms! But to a particular kind of law-and-order mindset, fraud isn’t really a crime when it happens to people you don’t like.

Here’s some great news from Ecuador: voters actually rejected their government’s attempts to re-integrate Ecuador into investor-state dispute settlement (or ISDS) systems, a feature of “free” trade deals which allows big corporations to run roughshod over a nation’s laws by claiming that, say, labor or environmental laws “cost them money.” Which, once again, suggests that when you ask the voters the right question, they tend to give the right answer – although politicians tend to ask the wrong questions on purpose, and asking 11 questions at once, as Ecuador did, can wear voters down (since voters also approved some pretty awful “security”-related initiatives). As an aside, which of these two fools do you want to represent you? is pretty clearly one of the wrong questions.

When I hear that Cigna threatened to fire a doctor who didn’t deny medical claims quickly enough, I’m compelled to ask: maybe finance people shouldn’t make all the decisions all the time at every single corporation? Or maybe private, for-profit health insurance corporations shouldn’t exist? And as for hand-wringing about “efficiency,” the article explains fairly clearly: “(m)easuring the speed and output of employees is common in many industries, from fast food to package delivery, but the use of these kinds of metrics in health care is controversial because the stakes are so high. It’s one thing if a rushed server forgets the fries with your burger. It’s another entirely if the pressure to act fast leads to wrongful denials of payment for vital care.” And dig the Cigna spokeshack claiming that “(e)ven if medical directors were incentivized to review more claims — which they are not — it makes no sense to suggest that this incentivizes denials; it would be far quicker to approve all claims.” And far more expensive to Cigna, they somehow failed to note. Lesson: corporate executives’ mammon-worship will always strangle good service in its crib.

Finally, another day, another reminder that no matter how many times you get crime hysteria from Republicans or your local news program, crime is actually going down. And now RNC spokeshack Anna Kelly says that USA Today’s reporting of these simple facts represent an effort to “gaslight Americans into believing that their lived experiences are wrong.” That should only persuade people who think their lived experiences are everyone’s lived experiences, a character flaw I find more pronounced in Trump votaries than in Americans generally. And those whose “lived experiences” consist only of seeing the same clips of violent crime over and over again on the news are the real gaslighting victims.

Action: concerning monopolies, price-gouging, and corporate Trumpholes.

Long story short: tell our FTC to block big oil mergers, tell big corporations to stop price-gouging, and denounce Home Depot’s founder for endorsing Donald Trump for President. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Demand Progress helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Chevron/Hess and Exxon/Pioneer Natural Resources mergers. Yeah, I always say “proposed” even though business “journalists” always treat proposed mergers like they’re done deals. Why, it’s like they want to brainwash you into accepting that they’re done deals! But they’re not, especially when our Federal Trade Commission seems to care about the pain corporate monopolies inflict on working families. Said pain includes lost jobs and higher prices, and I think good Americans have had enough of that in their lives.

In a related note, Civic Shout helps you tell big corporations to stop their price-gouging. Big corporations (which include monopolies) have the power to charge us whatever they want! Corporate lackeys like Larry Summers still say inflation and profits have nothing to do with each other, but when you see high inflation and record corporate profits at the same time, you know better. Does telling corporations to stop gouging us sound like a useless thing to do? Maybe it does. But we need to put them on notice that we know what they’re doing, and we also need to put them on notice that we’re watching what they’re doing.

Finally, Civic Shout also helps you denounce Home Depot’s founder for endorsing Donald Trump for President. Why, it’s like he doesn’t care that Donald Trump tried to overthrow our government! I guess we shouldn’t expect better from another “entrepreneur” who could never have made money back in the days we demanded that corporations account to all of us, and not just their shareholders. But it’s time they all felt the shame they deserve to feel. And then after that, how about we just not shop at Home Depot ever again? I bet there’s an Ace Hardware near you. And Ace Hardware stores are all co-ops!

Action: concerning junk fees, safe airways, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our FTC to fight junk fees, tell our FAA to protect our airways better, and tell our FTC to stop big oil corporation mergers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to take the most vigorous possible action against junk fees. Remember: folks who oppose FTC action want you never to know what you’re really paying for something until it’s too late, and why would they want that? So they can steal your money more easily, that’s why. And when right-wingers say big government regulations never work, a) remember they’re full of soup and b) ask them if never getting a transparent price is OK with them, because chances are they’ve been hurt by junk fees, too. I hope these rules do us some good before the 2024 election, because you think Donald Trump will protect us from junk fees? That is to laugh – that man is the human junk fee.

Civic Shout helps you tell our Federal Aviation Administration (or FAA) to start taking air traffic safety a lot more seriously. And if that means they have to use whatever lawful authority they have to ensure that we have enough air traffic controllers who get enough time off and don’t work themselves to the bone, then we’re just going to have to do that! I know “workers having enough rest and time off so they can stay sharp” is such a quaint concept – one that hinders big corporate CEOs from redistributing even more income upward, that’s for sure! – but air traffic controllers kinda have to be on their game all the time, especially with a New York Times report telling us that safety issues at airports are on the rise. So let’s make our government do the right thing.

Finally, Demand Progress helps you tell our FTC to stop the proposed Chevron/Hess and Exxon/Pioneer mergers. I keep saying “proposed” because I don’t want people to think that they’re done deals just because our “liberal” media reports on them like they’re already done deals – I mean, that would be tremendously disrespectful of our input, don’tcha think? And not only are they not done deals, the Biden Administration has taken antitrust policy seriously for the first time in about eight Presidents. Another reason we’ve got to tell them to do the right thing: because ten thousand corporate hacks will tell them to do the wrong thing, and spread their BS about how some monopolies are good for people. As anyone who’s paid for anything lately could tell you, they’re not.

Action: concerning internet freedom, education, and monopolies.

Long story short: tell our FCC to promote internet freedom, tell school boards to stop lying about climate change, and tell our FTC to stop big fossil fuel corporation mergers. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Battle for the Net helps you tell our Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) to reinstate network neutrality, the principle that you, and not some big telecom corporation, should decide where you want to go on our internet. Don’t believe the hype that “net neutrality will lead to higher prices,” because you’ve just spent almost three years watching big corporations raise prices for any damn reason. It’s hard to take someone hostage by threatening to do something you're already doing all the time! And if we bring net neutrality back, that means we can stop big corporations from censoring websites, or from slowing down websites that haven’t paid them tribute. You say they’re doing little of that now, and that may be, but if we don’t make it illegal, sooner or later they’ll do it all the time, and then it’ll be too late.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell state school boards to stop lying to children about climate change. Yes, the right-wing fever that’s swept school boards across America extends even here, as the Texas Board of Education just rejected seven textbooks for including material about climate change. One Texas Republican even said, “America's future generations don't need a leftist agenda brainwashing them in the classroom to hate oil and natural gas.” Imagine that! All common sense and scientific truth is now a “leftist agenda”! If only the leftist agenda were that good! Seriously, there ain’t gonna be any future generations if we let big oil and gas corporations make our planet unlivable. And politicians who are too weak to handle that truth deserve to live on government cheese.

Finally, Roots Action helps you tell our Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) to stop the proposed Chevron/Hess and Exxon/Pioneer Natural Resources mergers. Because big corporate mergers are always bad! Yes, I said always! So corporate shills on financial cable news shows can call me an “extremist”! Look, they either care about small businesses or they don’t, and letting already too-big fossil fuel corporations get even bigger basically means they don’t. What’s that I hear? Small businesses aren’t going to drill for oil ha ha ha snort? But they’ll have to deal with oil and gas corporations pretty much as a condition of existence, and if those oil and gas corporations are too big, they'll squeeze small businesses with impunity. And that’s un-American. Listen to all my extreme language today!

Around the table: mostly good news from antitrust enforcement to health care in Rwanda.

Big news: Lee Hepner at Big observes Thanksgiving dinner prices falling by almost 5%, and sees the hand of the Biden Administration antitrust efforts behind it – specifically, our Justice Department has broken (of all things) a turkey monopoly, our government has thwarted one proposed airline merger and forced another to be put on hold, and a federal jury found two big egg-producing corporations guilty of price-fixing, meaning those high prices that were all over the news last year had little to do with avian flu. It’d be nice if the Biden campaign would actually, you know, run on these efforts – but it’d also be nice if our “liberal” media covered these efforts the way they hysterically covered sky-high egg prices in the first place.

Have some more good news! Portugal lately relied entirely on renewable electricity for six consecutive days at the end of October and beginning of November. Plus Portugal made so much electricity they were able to export it to Spain for most of that stretch! Six days in a row is a big deal; the more it happens, the less we’ll have to hear about the “war on coal” and other manufactured outrages. And we should at least make it harder for Our Glorious Elites to manufacture outrages.

In a related note, the Guardian tells us that legendarily-frigid Norway has done a great job relying on heat pumps to heat their homes, largely through federal subsidies and – this is important – the absence of federal subsidies for fossil fuels. So when nay-sayers whine that heat pumps don’t work when it’s too cold, they actually mean it only returns about twice the heat for the electricity you use to run it when it’s far below freezing, which is another way of saying we want you to use the perfect to murder the good. Way too many folks still prefer chaos to progress.

In another related note, I am more than a little surprised to hear that electric scooters and e-bikes have displaced four times more demand for oil than electric cars have done, though, admittedly, much of that increase has come from China, where good Chinese were already riding mopeds a lot. I’ll admit I’ve always kinda side-eyed this option, figuring that e-bikes, especially, are for people who don’t want to exercise, but a) that may not even be true, since most folks split their exercise off from their transportation and b) it sounds like it’s actually helping save the planet. Also c) I moved to an area that’s really, really hilly and I see the attraction of an e-bike a little better now.

Ho hum, Iowa Republican official’s wife gets convicted of 52 counts of voter fraud, as she apparently filled out election forms for Vietnamese immigrants who, imagine that, didn’t really understand what she was doing. Strange how we only seem to catch right-wingers for actual voter fraud, despite all the whining they do about it. Ms. Taylor faces a max of five years of prison per charge; not that I think she’ll really get that (or that I think she should get that), but it’ll be interesting to hear right-wingers suddenly find Jesus about long prison sentences.

Ari Paul at FAIR reminds us that Elon Musk’s "thermonuclear" defamation lawsuit against Media Matters is “About Destroying Free Speech.” He must hope us “little people” don’t get it in our heads to tabulate which big corporate ads turn up right next to all that disgusting anti-Semitic/pro-Nazi content he allows on Twitter! I’d say I hope Mr. Musk loses this frivolous lawsuit in the most humiliating manner possible, but I actually doubt he’s physically capable of humiliation. Which is yet another reason a civilized society shouldn’t let billionaires grow this big!

Finally, Rwanda has seen a significant drop in malaria cases, to the point where its national Biomedical Center says it’s on track to achieve zero malaria. Scientists point to increased use of mosquito netting and indoor insecticides as major factors in the drop, and that, I’m sad to say, will be good practice for when too many folks refuse the malaria vaccine the World Health Organization has just approved. But Rwanda’s success reminds us that good people doing good works are everywhere on Earth, even in nations we call “developing” – or worse.

Action: concerning health care, Arctic drilling, and bad media.

Long story short: tell your state legislators to keep drug prices down, tell the Biden Administration to protect the Arctic from drilling, and tell big cable corporations to stop paying the “Fox fee.” Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your state legislators to create Prescription Drug Affordability Boards that can cap drug costs. In a nation where life-saving drugs costs more than they do anywhere else on Earth, where big pharma corporations jack up the price of life-saving drugs just because they can, where good Americans ration their insulin at the cost of losing their own lives, Prescription Drug Affordability Boards are the least our state legislators can do to protect us from predatory corporate drug pricing. Some states have health insurance commissioners who can cap insurance premiums, but we need that sort of thing for drug prices, too. When your right-wing pals call that “bureaucracy,” remind them how well the “free” market is keeping drug prices down! And stop inviting them to your cookouts.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management (or BLM) to protect our Arctic public lands from fossil fuel drilling. If you hear folks say “there’s nothing up there anyway,” remind them that, at the very least, the salmon they get from the supermarket often comes from up there, and it won’t anymore if oil corporations pollute the water, as they all eventually do. Anyway, they’re wrong, and their ignorance of the area shouldn’t carry more weight than the views of folks who actually like clean water and wildlife diversity. But if we don’t leave public comments on the Biden Administration proposal – I hear it’s actually pretty good – then their ignorant views will carry more weight than ours. That would be a tragedy, and an avoidable one at that.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell big telecom corporations to stop paying high rates to the Fox News (sic) Channel. It’s bad enough that if you want to watch HGTV or the Cartoon Network you have to pay for a cable package that includes Fox News, but Fox News demands relatively usurious rates from cable corporations for the “privilege” of delivering rage and hate to Americans broken by a half-century of bad economic policy! And that means you pay more for cable, and Fox News makes money they don’t deserve to make! In a sane and decent world, on-air “personalities” like Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld would have to live on government cheese, because they wouldn’t be good at anything people need. In our sick, immoral, and decadent world, they make millions of dollars spewing filth every night, and we need to fight that.

Action: concerning the Dakota pipeline, corporate crime, and voting rights.

Long story short: tell our government to scuttle the Dakota Access Pipeline, start going after corporate criminals, and enact automatic voter registration. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

The Native Alliance Organizers Fund helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to scuttle the notorious Dakota Access Pipeline. Word on the street is that the Corps essentially farmed out their proposal to a big oil corporation to write! And of course our government has already rerouted the pipeline so it wouldn’t pollute water where more white folks live (both in South Dakota and in Iowa!), and then violated treaties made with Native American nations (as well as our laws!) during its construction. At least a judge ordered the Corps to do another environmental review, after doing a shoddy one in advance of the pipeline’s 2016 approval; now we’ve got a chance to tell them what we think of it, again.

Public Citizen helps you tell your government to start going after corporate criminals a lot more vigorously. Sam Bankman-Fried got convicted of fraud, but that’s unusual; it’s almost always the little guy paying for some little crime while the big guys get away with big crimes. That’s the “weaponization of law enforcement,” not right-wing whining over how Donald Trump is somehow the “victim” of his 91 felony charges. They want to talk about “government going after political opponents”? All of us little guys are potential political opponents of Our Glorious Elites, so they come after us and leave each other alone. We should at least tell them we’re on to them.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your state government to enact automatic voter registration already. Why would they not? Because they want as few people to vote as possible, that’s why, and sadly I’ve found that true of Democratic governments as well as Republican ones. Fewer votes means fewer people to control! Remember that when they tell you they oppose automatic voter registration because it’ll “enable voter fraud.” You mean the “voter fraud” they can never convict anyone of? And keep in mind we live in a time where so, so much paperwork documents our every move, so don’t believe the “voter fraud” hype.

Action: concerning government spying, animal abuse, and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the Cooper Davis Act and pass Canyon’s Law and the FATCAT Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Center for Rights and Dissent helps you tell your Congressfolk to oppose the Cooper Davis Act, which would force internet service-providing corporations to report to our Attorney General regarding substance abuse violations. I got a better idea: how about our government get warrants for that information? And I got an even better idea: how about we stop putting drug users in jail and start getting them the help they need instead? Sure, we’d have to start seeing drug users as patients and not criminals, and ending the war on drugs also means less racism. But I’m all for enabling our personal growth as a nation – just not by giving law enforcement more weapons to bludgeon us with.

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass Canyon’s Law and outlaw the use of cyanide bombs to kill animals on our public lands. Because cyanide bombs are absolutely heinous! They result in a slow, painful, and torturous death for anyone nearby, and n.b. that pronoun – cyanide bombs don’t just kill animals that prey on livestock, they can also kill any animal who happens to be nearby, and they can also kill any human being who happens to be nearby. In fact, the bill’s authors have named their bill after an Idaho boy who almost died from cyanide bomb exposure. Could it be that just throwing hurt and pain around isn’t the only way to solve problems?

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Fueling Alternative Transportation with a Carbon Aviation Tax (or FATCAT) Act. Again, the acronym isn’t as unwieldy as you might have expected! Believe it or not, folks with their own jets actually pay less in fuel taxes than folks who fly commercial flights (i.e., you and I), but the FATCAT Act would increase that tax eightfold (from 22 cents per gallon to $1.95 per gallon) and end exemptions for oil exploration and logging. Oil and logging CEOs hardly need the handout, after all! And given how oil tax breaks helps foster the right-wing movement that eventually destroyed the New Deal, perhaps we should be more careful about that.

Action: concerning taxes, stock buybacks, and sacred lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax the rich and corporations harder and pass the Reward Work Act and the Ruby Mountains Protection Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

You’ve heard about the debt limit deal President Biden and Speaker McCarthy negotiated, but Demand Progress still helps you tell your Congressfolk to get rid of the private jet tax deduction from the 2017 Trump tax “reform,” while Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. As they consider this deal, we need to remind them of what their real priority should be: making sure folks with enough money to ruin the world pay their fair share of taxes so we can all have health care and roads and bridges and cops. If nothing else, they’ll more likely remember next time – and if they don’t, we’ll remind them again.

Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Reward Work Act, which would ban stock buybacks and let workers elect a third of all corporate boards. If you’re not seeing right away how that would “reward work,” recall that quite a few corporations (Bed, Bath and Beyond most recently) have gone belly-up after using their profits to buy back stock rather than, you know, pay workers, develop new products, or improve their operations. Stock buybacks, in short, don’t “reward work,” they reward wealth. And getting more workers on corporate boards will also help keep executives from doing only what’s best for them – which will also reward work. So let’s get this done.

Finally, the Native Organizers Alliance helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ruby Mountains Protection Act, which would permanently protect the Ruby Mountains of Nevada – a sacred land to certain Shoshone nations – from oil and gas drilling. The energy you extract from the ground will get used up eventually, and the money big corporate executives make from oil and gas drilling will get used up eventually, but sacred lands are forever, if you can keep them. And the Shoshone have already prevented our government from drilling for oil and gas in the Ruby Mountains in 2019, so we know this can be done; our Congressfolk just have to have the will to do it. And they won’t, unless we express our will in numbers they can’t deny.

Action: concerning facial recognition, the care economy, and renewable energy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to ban facial recognition software at performance venues, invest more in our care economy, and ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefit renewable energy exclusively. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell Congress to prohibit performance venues from using facial recognition software on event-goers. You don’t even have to know that facial recognition can’t tell Black people apart any better than your January 6-addled uncle can to tell Congress to ban its use; you only need know that facial recognition enables law enforcement fishing expeditions, and opposing those, I would think, would be something conservatives could get behind as well as liberals. If your right-wing neighbor retorts BUTZ I SUPPORTZ TEH POLICEZ!!!!, just remind him that could be him getting profiled and wrongly-arrested the next time Bruce Springsteen rolls into town.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell Congressfolk to invest in our care economy. Sound like a tall order for a Republican House that cares only about drama? Doesn’t matter! Right is right, and duty is duty, and Congress has a duty to help us make our lives better, not stand by while nursing home corporations and child care corporations continue to gouge good Americans who can’t do without them. They say inflation is bad, but inflation has, for a very long time, been really bad in areas of our economy that folks can’t simply refuse to participate in – if you have kids or elderly parents, they need care. So our Congressfolk have got to help, not hurt.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to ensure that any effort at permitting reform benefits renewable energy producers exclusively. Because there’s enough filth in our air and water already, and when politicians talk about the shift to clean energy “killing jobs,” they’re full of soup. Solar and wind and geothermal all create jobs; what they don’t do as well as coal and oil and gas corporations is redistribute more of your wealth upward to executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) are trying to take us toward more pollution and unearned income for bosses, so we’ve got to step up.

Action: concerning education, cruelty to animals, and Arctic drilling.

Long story short: tell the College Board to stop caving to right-wingers over its AP African-American Studies course, tell your Congressfolk to ban glue traps, and tell our government to reject the Willow drilling plan in the Arctic Ocean. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The National Campaign for Justice helps you tell the College Board to stop caving to right-wingers over the AP African-American Studies course. The Florida Board of Education rejected it, and then Gov. DeSantis (E-FL) said it was worthless, and how did the College Board respond? By removing “controversial” elements and adding more right-wing Black content to the curriculum! They said educators were weak, and they were right! Not that I mind teaching people about Thomas Sowell; at least it’ll innoculate students against folks like Thomas Sowell in real life. But we’ve got to stop treating right-wing whining as if it’s “serious discourse.”

Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation outlawing glue traps. We think of glue traps as a “humane” way to get rid of mice, but it’s not – it causes the pest to starve to death, at the very least, and can even cause it to suffocate (if its mouth gets in the glue, presumably); a more humane way of getting rid of mice would be to get a cat or two, and usually cats don’t even have to kill mice, but merely deter them. You know, we don’t know a whole lot about death – we think about it a lot, and we tell ourselves stories about it so we feel better about it, but we imagine things like glue traps aren’t cruel merely because all the animals’ suffering happens out of our sight. But “out of sight” doesn’t mean “doesn’t suffer.”

Finally, Food and Water Watch helps you tell our Bureau of Land Management to reject the Willow drilling plan in the Arctic ocean. By now you know the drill: cleaning up spills in the Arctic is many times harder than cleaning them up in temperate climes (and corporations don’t want to clean up their messes there, either!). Also, we know so little about the ecosystems up there that we really ought to avoid screwing it up – though we do know enough about the salmon industry in Alaska (one of the world’s biggest) that we know we’ll screw it up if we’re not careful. And it’s never a matter of “if” a big oil corporation will spill a lot of oil into our oceans – it’s always a matter of when. So, yeah, let’s not do this stupid thing, either.

Action: concerning campaign finance, price-gouging, and internet freedom.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment overruling Citizens United and prevent big oil corporation price-gouging, and tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our FCC already . Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Constitutional amendment to overturn our Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling now. That ruling called laws restricting campaign finance “unconstitutional,” even though virtually everyone in America, conservative or liberal, supports such restrictions, and anyway money isn’t “speech” any more than a corporation’s a person. And though its proponents argue that redressing one’s grievances against a government costs money these days, having more money shouldn’t give you “more rights.” (I wish that were the worst argument against campaign finance reform; this post I wrote almost nine years ago lists some of those.)

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that would penalize big oil corporations for price-gouging. Whenever you see high price hikes coupled with high profits, you’re free to say “look, I’m not a schmuck.” Oh, sure, they said it was the war in Ukraine, but, again, we’re not schmucks. And we don’t live in a “free” market, either – we live in a corporation-dominated market, where corporations make decisions based on what delivers the most money to their executives and shareholders, not on, you know, what’s good for people. Or even what’s good for the corporation long-term! And that’s why our government has to step in on our behalf.

Finally, Daily Kos also helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn to our Federal Communications Commission already. Look, I don’t care that big telecom corporations hate her, and I don’t care that one police union in Chicago hates her; I care that she helped create our FCC’s short-lived net neutrality order from 2016. Every normal person who’s ever thought about net neutrality – the principle that you, not some corporation, should decide how fast and in what order internet documents gets to your computer – likes it; it doesn’t matter whether they’re liberal or conservative, and when liberals and conservatives stand together against the corporations, we deserve to win. Getting Gigi Sohn on our FCC will help us get that win.

Action: concerning price-gouging and taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to stop big oil price-gouging and reject the so-called FAIR Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to penalize big oil corporations for price-gouging. It ain’t tough math: high inflation plus high profits at the same time equal big corporations taking advantage of us. I always thought gas prices shooting up at the same time as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a cover, too. It’s amazing how, even 20 years ago, even conservative economics would have caught this rather intimate relationship between high inflation and high profits, but today's right-wingers don’t care about facts, only about drama. And our “liberal” media has coddled them for too long. But that’s why we step up.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to pass the so-called FAIR Tax. The so-called FAIR Tax would replace our income, corporate, and payroll taxes with a national sales tax, one they used to call a “23% tax” although it was always a 30% tax. 30 cents on the dollar is 30%, you see, but 30 is 23% of $1.30, and 23 is less than 30, so it sounds better! But it’s not how we’ve done math for thousands of years, and when most folks realize they’re paying a lower tax rate right now – even the 24% bracket extends all the way up to $182,100 in income for single folks – they won’t go for a 30% sales tax. But we’ve got to make folks realize that, and we have to put our Congressfolk on notice.

Action: concerning the war on Yemen, money laundering, and the debt ceiling.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to get us out of the war on Yemen, pass the ENABLERS Act, and abolish the debt ceiling. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution getting us the hell out of the Saudi/UAE coalition’s war on Yemen. Because it’s killing good Yemeni civilians as well as taking out some of the world’s best fighters against al-Qaeda, funny how that works out, right, Kurds? Saudi Arabia’s also cut back oil production as a sop to Russia, whose government deserves no sops at all. Too many politicians act like we have no alternative to allying with Saudi Arabia, too many generals wind up becoming consultants for Saudi Arabia, and too many regular Americans act like Saudi Arabia’s OK because Iran’s worse. Like the Greatest Nation on Earth should ever have to choose!

The Project on Government Oversight helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5525, the ENABLERS Act. I’ve been calling folks who give aid and comfort to dictators “enablers” for close to two decades now, so it’s nice to see Congress getting into the act. The ENABLERS Act would give our government more tools to crack down on the many forms of money-laundering that enable Russia to continue its doomed-but-still-evil war on Ukraine; I suppose some folks on the right (cough Rand Paul cough) would complain that this would give government more tools to snoop into your bank account, but it’s actually hard to look like you’re laundering money for Russia unless you’re doing that.

Finally, Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to abolish the debt ceiling. Used to be the debt ceiling was just useless, since Congress raised it all the time without controversy, but now the debt ceiling is a tool of evil, since Republicans take it hostage every time they want to hurt good Americans. I am not overstating the case! As we speak, Republicans are telling us that if they get control of either house of Congress again, they will create another debt limit drama aimed at forcing cuts to Medicare and Social Security. Republicans are being so obvious about it that Democrats are even running ads about it! So, as with the filibuster, it’s best to take weapons away from legislators when they abuse them.

Around the table: tabulating various kinds of corruption for the 814th time.

Thinking maybe sports isn’t a healthy outlet for our stress after all? Rick Eckstein at The Conversation discusses “how abuse is baked into American sports.” As you read about how many young athletes don’t speak out about verbal and physical abuse out of fear of getting “benched,” you may recall those Little League Dads who yelled at their kids all the way from the batter’s box after they struck out. You may also recall how news coverage has bled into “liberal” media news coverage in more ways than one, not just in sports news executives moving into straight news divisions, but also in all the horserace coverage. You may also decide that “winning at all costs” is just as toxic an attitude in politics as it is in sports.

Uh oh: Rep. Ted Budd, the Trump-endorsed North Carolina Republican Senate nominee, helped a pair of big banks merge in 2019, and the resulting behemoth not only laid off over a thousand workers and closed a few hundred branches, but it’s also resulted in at least one low-interest loan and tens of thousands of bucks in campaign donations for Mr. Budd!. I guess Donald Trump would call all that “smart”! Seriously, if Democratic nominee Cheri Beasley doesn’t make a whole lot of hay about this, she deserves to lose this race. There’s no “let’s not be too strident about corruption” vote out there to be had.

Ho hum, six of the seven biggest health insurance corporations get more than half their revenues from our government – i.e., the taxpayer, i.e., us – but still jack up prices much faster than inflation just like they were doing before the Affordable Care Act became law. Oh, but expanding Medicare to everyone would be TEH SOSHULIZMZ!!!!! The only people who think of “socialism” as a scare word are far right-wingers who let everything anger them. And even fewer folks get their hackles up at the words “price controls.” A lot of good Americans would like some more price control in their lives! (They’d also like to not be moved from their Medicare plans to Medicare Advantage plans – which deny a lot of claims! – without their consent.)

Wondering why rent prices are going up so quickly? Brace yourself: one corporation’s algorithm might be responsible for most of it. Algorithms ruining things where people might manage them more deftly – gosh, where have I heard that story before? But at least the algorithm isn’t an irredeemable asshole, like the people who promote the algorithm, who are the sorriest bunch of tone-deaf losers I’ve ever heard. They actually celebrate when prices go up beyond what good Americans can afford! They actually encourage landlords to leave units open because the jacked-up prices of their occupied units more than compensate! They actually say that landlords have “too much empathy” compared to the algorithm! If I were the Deity, they would abide in fire for all eternity.

The Center for American Progress describes, at some length, how “Offshore Wind Can Lower Energy Prices and Beat Out Oil and Gas.” Wind power has competed, expense-wise, with fossil fuels for the better part of a decade now, and “spills and cleanup costs are negligible with offshore wind,” (n.b. “negligible,” not “non-existent,” right-wing trolls!). This is all true regardless of the histrionics right-wingers employ about the “noise” (obviously none of them have ever lived in New Jersey!) or the “piles of dead birds” (as a friend of mine said once, it sure is a good thing oil spills have never killed any birds!). Time to kick climate change’s ass!

Finally, dig this simple-minded horseshit poll from Fox News alleging that more Americans want help from our government than they used to. I don’t mind the result, I guess (more Americans want help than don’t), but I do mind the question: whether you want your government to “lend me a hand” or “leave me alone.” Gosh, binary much? Good Americans want more help from their government where they need it and less interference where they don’t; most of us favor expanding Medicare to include everyone, for example, but I bet none of us favor expanded warrantless spying. Those are just the first examples that leaped to my mind! Did anything leap to Fox News’s mind when they formulated their poll, besides goading Americans into being the stupidest version of themselves?

Action: concerning immigration, pollution, and corruption.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the DREAM Act, reject efforts to gut the National Environmental Policy Act, and prohibit Congressfolk from trading in stocks. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 264, the DREAM Act. Like President Biden's recent moves on marijuana pardons and student loan debt, the DREAM Act is not some radical act, but a bill that would simply expand the number of immigrants brought here as children who can stay in the only country they know anything about, as long as they demonstrate continued residence here and continued contributions to society. Shouting about PROTECTINGZ TEH BORDURZ!!!! and BUILDINGZ TEH WALLZ!!!! is entirely inappropriate in the context of someone who literally had no say in coming to America. In fact, it’s damn cruel. Is it so fucking much to ask for people not to be cruel in America?

US PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk not to weaken the National Environmental Policy Act. When you hear the likes of Joe Manchin talk about “permitting reform,” they really mean they don’t want federal agencies to evaluate big gas, oil, and pipeline projects for the harm they might do to our clean air and clean water, hence the drive to “reform” the National Environmental Policy Act. I guess we should be happy that Republicans helped take down Mr. Manchin’s infamous “side deal” on “permitting reform,” which they appear to have done out of pique. The pique of evil people is a hell of a thing to count on, though; we’d do better to count on ourselves, doing our job as Americans.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation banning members of Congress from owning or trading individual stocks. Because you can’t trust people who are compromised by their own investments! And if your Congressperson pretends to get all offended at that, trust your own common sense rather than their histrionics. Congresspeople oversee vast swaths of our economy, and if they invest their own money in the parts of our economy they’re overseeing, they won’t do it on our behalf, but on their own. It’s that simple. Congress has really dropped the ball on this matter this year, but that just means we have to make them do better.

Around the table: from OPEC+ shenanigans to Presidential pardons.

Sen. Schumer (D-NY) excoriates OPEC+ for deciding to ratchet back oil production, which has already helped drive American gas prices up, and though he concentrates most of his fire on how this move affects Russia’s war on Ukraine – which is not going so well for Russia, you may have noticed! – I can’t help but notice that we’re less than a month out from midterms here, and higher gas prices won’t help Democrats hold either House or Senate. Republicans could help out, I suppose, by excoriating President Biden for failing to get better behavior out of Saudi Arabia when he went there over the summer, which sets up the easy retort: so you’re saying we’re not appeasing Saudi Arabia enough?

I wish it were more of a surprise that celebrity chef/philanthropist José Andrés has tried to block an initiative that would raise wages for tipped workers in Washington, D.C., his base of operations, but I’ve seen nominally liberal restauranteurs do similar things before, and a lot nominally liberal bosses in any field clench when their own employees demand better from them. But this is one reason we live in communities – so that we have folks who can grab us by the scruff and tell us we’re going wrong. (Don’t believe the hype that Mr. Andrés et al are “just trying to preserve jobs in the wake of the pandemic.” First off, it’s rubbish, and second off, if they didn’t say that, they’d just say something else.)

Once again, from the “I Shouldn’t Have to Spend Any Time on This Shit” file: per Factcheck.org, “(t)here is no evidence that babies are harmed by drinking breast milk from mothers who have received a COVID-19 vaccine.” You may have heard differently on social media – that, for example, a study found that “7 out of 11 women had mRNA in their breast milk.” Generally you don’t hear that a) it was actually 5 women out of 11 and b) it was an infinitesimal amount of mRNA that disappeared in less than 48 hours. Also too, 11 women ain’t exactly a big sample, and if you’re a mom, do you really want to put yourself at risk of dying from COVID by not getting vaccinated? Thus we are reminded, once again, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and also that clichés often endure for good reason.

Many have wondered just why Mehmet Oz gave a speech at a Florida fundraiser not very far from one of Adolf Hitler's cars, and I suppose right-wingers will shrug and say “it was a museum,” I think Mr. Oz once again is actually looking to appeal to fascists in Pennsylvania, just like he did when he criticized John Fetterman for being too anti-authority. But I’m not sure that’ll work – only a few American fascists really like Hitler, and those can easily make a show of hating him. Remember what Richard Spencer was talking about right before he got punched in the face that time? He was talking about how much actual Nazis hated him. Fake “independence” continues to disgust me.

Uh oh: New Hampshire Senate Republican candidate Don Bolduc unfurled this gem about “who should decide abortion rights”: “It belongs to the state. It belongs to these gentlemen right here, who are state legislators representing you.” While New Hampshire doesn’t allow state-level ballot referenda, legislators don’t “decide for you” so much as do your will, or at least that’s how it’ll work when we all insist that’s how it should work. And if you’re running for office, the last thing you want say is any variation of these men decide abortion for you. Between this and his flip-flip-flopping on the 2020 election being “stolen,” Mr. Bolduc’s not having a good month, and this is not a good time to have a bad month.

When I hear that well over half of all Republican nominees for House, Senate, and the four top state offices think Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election he actually won by seven million votes, I think Democrats should absolutely run ads about all of them, so that independent voters know who the whiner is and who the adult in the room is. That way we can prevent a good chunk of them – perhaps even those running in “safely Republican seats,” since we all know that can turn in a minute since we’ve all seen it happen in our lifetimes – from ever holding office. I still have my doubts that Democrats really want to win races, though – I mean, why take on actual responsibilities when you can raise lots of money either way?

Finally, President Biden issues pardons for all Americans convicted of simple marijuana possession since that became a crime in 1971, and orders a study on descheduling marijuana, adding that keeping pot on Schedule I along with drugs like heroin “makes no sense.” Only around 10,000 Americans will get pardons – if your state rung you up for pot possession, you’d need to go to your Governor for a pardon – but this is all more than I expected from President Biden, even though he said he’d do that and more, so I applaud it. I feel compelled to point out, though, that (like his student loan forgiveness program) it’s also exactly the kind of good first step that shouldn’t attract a lot of Republican anger but does anyway, because Republicans only do anger these days. Plus they’re all running on TEH CRIMEZ!!!!, because what else can they run on, their great ideas? The good news: most Americans want to legalize pot, and they don’t automatically associate toking with murder.

Action: concerning overtime pay, drug policy, and offshore drilling.

Long story short: tell the Biden Administration to help more Americans get overtime protections, decriminalize pot at the federal level, and end offshore oil and gas drilling leases. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

More Perfect Union helps you tell President Biden to update our nation’s overtime rules so more good Americans can get overtime pay. You may also want to tell him to do better job than President Obama did; the Obama rule, overturned by a Texas District Court Judge late in 2016, essentially established the difference between workers with executive/administrative duties and workers without only by salary, when the rest of us establish that difference by, you know, looking at a worker’s actual duties. President Biden can avoid this by raising the pay threshold for overtime pay, without overreaching (or sabotaging!).

Progress America helps you tell President Biden to take marijuana off of Schedule I (and not move it to any other Schedule), which would essentially decriminalize pot at the federal level. This is exactly the wrong place to be a “law-and-order” politician – why, many right-wingers who fancy themselves “law-and-order” adherents actually support legalizing pot! And despite his reported misgivings, Mr. Biden promised on the campaign trail to “decriminalize marijuana, period,” “let out” anyone serving time for possession, and “expunge” the crime from everyone’s records; it’s really, really hard to find any wiggle room there. So he can start by descheduling pot.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell our Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Bureau (or BOEM) to end offshore oil and gas leases. Again, President Biden said he’d put an end to that, and his attempt to do so got overturned in court, but this public commenting process allows us to establish a body of evidence that might get the next oil/gas drilling lease ban through a court – our laws don’t allow our Executive branch to solicit public opinion and then simply ignore it, after all. Think we should keep drilling for oil and gas in the ocean? Then think of the Spillageddon in the Gulf slamming our shrimp industry in 2010. And think of oil/gas drilling killing our salmon industry in Alaska.

Action: concerning our media, Social Security, and pollution.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, fully-fund our Social Security Administration, and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Remember that time I told you to tell your Congressfolk to reject the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act? Well, Matt Stoller has convinced me I was wrong, so feel free to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass it. I said the bill would have “link taxes” in it, and while such a thing could happen, it hasn’t happened in Australia, where a similar bill passed and has revitalized the journalism industry there. The bill would basically allow newspapers to collectively bargain for better ad rates with Google and Facebook; newspapers can’t do that now because it would run afoul of antitrust law, but farmers get this exemption under certain circumstances, and newspapers should, too.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to fulfill President Biden’s request for additional Social Security Administration funding. We’re finally starting to fund our IRS so we can go after rich tax cheats, and Republicans are telling lies about it – the IRS is coming for you, working person, as though that wasn’t all they were already doing! What will Republicans say about funding our Social Security Administration so it can reopen offices and extend hours? I mean, Rick Scott already said any cut to Medicare spending equals a cut to benefits, so the opposite must also apply, right? I kid, of course – they’ll say whatever. But our seniors deserve more help.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuel corporations. Joe Manchin made sure the Inflation Reduction Act had some of those, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still tell our Congressfolk that we don’t want to spend any more taxpayer money (i.e., our hard-earned money) on dying industries that pump filth into our air and water. But, as the Inflation Reduction Act also does, we need to subsidize emerging renewable energies more than we subsidize oil, gas, or coal. And the only folks who don’t see that are the folks who make all their money from oil, gas, and coal – and the Congressfolk they buy, of course.

Action: concerning inflation, taxes, and campaign finance disclosure.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil windfall profits and billionaire income, and pass campaign finance disclosure legislation. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. There’s a news hook, of course: both Exxon Mobil and Chevron announced record profits for the 2nd quarter of 2022, which just so happens to coincide with that period over the last few months where we've all had to pay for gas in gold doubloons. It's because of the war in Ukraine, they said, but horsedoodle – they raised prices because they could, and what were we going to do about it? Stop driving to work and to the grocery store? No, we were not. But if we pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations, they’ll never be able to hold us hostage this way again. And that alone would be worth it.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 8558, the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act,which would (as its title suggests) ensure that every household worth more than $100 million pays 20% of all their income every year, be it salary or unrealized investments. That’s 20,000 households, so don’t brook any stupidity about how this tax would “affect small businesses” or “affect working families,” because it won’t. Some folks don’t want to tax the wealthy as hard as we should because they think they’re going to be in the club someday! But remember that naked self-interest is a stupid reason to do almost anything.

Finally, the Daily Kos Democracy Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 443, the DISCLOSE Act, which would crack down on foreign contributions to American political campaigns, and would also require organizations (including corporations, labor unions, and political action committees) to disclose the names and addresses of folks who donate over $10,000 to that organization. If “the inclusion of the information would subject the person to serious threats, harassment, or reprisals,” the organization could keep that info secret. But I would presume “serious” reprisals would not include a finger-wagging lecture from a neighbor or a mean post on a public social media page.

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, and fossil fuels.

Long story short: tell your Senators to pass legislation raising taxes on the rich and lowering prescription drug prices, tell your PA state legislators to stop investing in gas infrastructure, and tell your Congressfolk to pass a big oil corporation windfall profits tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell our Senators to pass a bill that will raise taxes on the rich and lower prescription drug prices for all of us. No, it literally does not matter that Joe Manchin torpedoed just such a thing this past week! Nobody made Joe Manchin our One Great and True and Real American President, and if this was your will last week, and it’s still the right thing to do, then why wouldn’t it be your will this week? Because of one spiritually and morally corrupt Senator? Our Glorious Elites have created a Second Gilded Age in America, where corporations gouge us so lazy executives so they can gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes, so we ain’t got time for Manchinean drama.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Penn PIRG helps you tell your state legislator to end all new gas infrastructure investment. They’ll say what Tom Corbett used to say – “I want the jobs” – as if there’s just no other way to create jobs! You know what’s actually a pretty good way to create jobs? Invest in renewable energy infrastructure like there’s no tomorrow, and not just because there’ll actually be no tomorrow if we don’t. A lot of out-of-work coal miners would take to building out solar and wind and geothermal infrastructure pretty well – a lot better than they’d take to “just learning to code,” which seems to be Our Glorious Elites’ answer to everyone they’ve ever displaced through their laziness and apathy.

Finally, More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall tax on big oil corporations. Rule one is “when prices and profits go up at the same time, corporations are stealing food out of your mouth.” And rule two is “if you’re tempted to think they’re raising prices because of Russia’s war on Ukraine, see rule one.” Seriously, we live in such a sick, immoral, and decadent time that CEOs just come out and say they’re passing costs on to the consumer, and investors just come out and say you should invest in a corporation which has a lot of control over pricing. There’s another name for such a corporation, though, and that name is evil. And we need to start punishing evil in America again.

Action: concerning taxes, animal abuse, and endless war-making.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits, pass the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, and repeal the 2002 Iraq AUMF. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits. Yeah, gas prices have been coming down for about a month – too late for June’s inflation figures, you may notice, but maybe not too late for July’s, which come out on August 10 – but big oil corporations are still making far too much money “dealing with circumstances” that they might better deal with by eating some profit and being good to Americans. Of course, the powerful don’t do that, unless we make them. And then they whine about how “onerous” our laws are! But when we make them do the right thing, we make good things happen. History always shows that.

The Endangered Species Coalition helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7398, the Prohibit Wildlife Killing Contests Act, which would, as its title suggests, make it illegal to conduct a wildlife killing contest on public lands. The bill specifically excludes invasive species, in case your right-wing neighbor was going to launch that objection without reading the bill, as they often do, but a wildlife killing contest strikes me as merely an excuse for testosterone-addled men to be cruel, and we really shouldn’t be giving them more opportunities to do that. Especially on public lands, where protected species don’t all walk around with signs around their necks.

Finally, the Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Iraq War Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). Why bother after all these years? Because Presidents still use it to launch illegal and unconstitutional war efforts, like former President Trump’s assassination of Iranian General Soleimani, and you give a President a weapon like that, they’re going to use it sooner or later. And bad people will use and abuse bad laws, and the 2002 Iraq AUMF is a profoundly bad law that did profound evil. That Mr. Bush ever asked for it, and Congress ever passed it, still deeply offends me, and it’s not the kind of thing you just “let go” of, not if you want to stop it from happening again.

Action: concerning baby formula, child care, gas prices, big ag, and "forever chemicals."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to break up baby formula monopolies, help working families better afford child care, tax big oil windfall profits, break up monopolistic big ag practices, and keep "forever chemicals" off our farmlands. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell Congress to pass legislation ensuring we never get this short on baby formula again. Right-wingers tell us we're here because we have too many regulations gumming up the works, but that's ridiculous -- we're short on baby formula because four big corporations control the entire market, and a food safety issue at one of them has emptied our shelves. Thus we tell our Congressfolk to break up corporate monopolies; after all, as our President says, capitalism without competition is exploitation, and the only "efficiency" we really "gain" from monopolies is the efficient redistribution of income upward from workers to executives. I'd rather have babies not starve myself.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation expanding preschool and helping working families afford child care. It is a bit breathtaking that legislation about child care specifically has floated around for years, but now our President has embraced it, and the only reasons it hasn't passed, basically, are a) the opposition of Republicans and b) the Joe Manchin Drama Machine. But child care costs have plagued families for decades -- like health care, corporations charge what they want because they can! -- and families need relief now. Expanding preschool can also help deliver that relief; after all, if kids are in preschool, they're not in some private child care service. See? Big Gummint helps sometimes.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a big oil corporation windfall tax. As I've said, anyone who can't see the link between record profits and record-high gas prices by now simply doesn't want to see it. And folks (including Democratic politicians!) who claim that taxing unearned profits of oil corporations will "decrease the supply of oil" are all but saying not only that oil corporations have all the power, but that they should have all the power. It's rhetorical hostage-taking: don't make oil corporations pay their share of taxes, or the gas supply gets it! And if you're pro-freedom, you don't take that from anyone.

Food and Water Action helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4421/S. 2332, the Farm System Reform Act, which would ban new factory farms, split up existing factory farms into smaller operations, and end the stranglehold middlemen have over meat production and sales. Yeah, this is a theme with us -- bigger is badder -- and it's a theme because bigness infects every part of our economy, and most Americans, be they liberal or conservative, oppose concentrated power. Right-wingers give lip service to small businesses, but they aim to give all of our power to large corporations. Because that keeps the big campaign donations coming! But we outnumber them, so we must overpower them.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to keep PFAS chemicals off our farmlands. You can find PFAS chemicals -- which scientists link to certain cancers, birth defects, and immune system issues -- in firefighting foam, fast-food packaging, waterproof jackets, and non-stick saucepans, but you can also find them in agricultural wastewater treatments, meaning you can also find them in our food, water, feed animals, and agricultural workers. They call PFAS chemicals "forever chemicals" because our bodies can't break them down; they should call them everywhere chemicals too! Odd how the more "efficient" they make our food-producing apparatus, the less healthy it becomes.

Action: concerning free speech, voting rights, oil, corporate NDAs, and OAN.

Long story short: tell Russia to stop oppressing protestors, tell PA state legislators to stop wasting taxpayer money "investigating" the 2020 election, tell California to stop buying Amazon rainforest oil, tell state governments to stop allowing NDAs between legislators and corporations, and tell Verizon to drop OAN like a hot potato. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Amnesty International helps you tell the Russian government to stop oppressing anti-war protestors. Russia has arrested some 15,000 of them, and this is Vladimir Putin's Russia, not Anton Chekhov's Russia, so "arrest" might well equal "never see the outside world again." Russia has charged some of these protestors with "disseminating false information" and "discrediting" Russian soldiers, which are just the kinds of "charges" snowflake governments come up with when they can't win arguments on the merits. Do we expect Russia to wilt under our express will? No, we do not -- me, I expect them to laugh at us. But do we consider it our duty as human beings to express our will anyway? Yes, we do.

Pennsylvania residents, take note: Common Cause helps you tell your state legislators to stop wasting taxpayer money (i.e., your money) on their sham election "review." They've spent nearly half a mil on this, and guess what they've found? Nothing, of course, in over a year and a half, and they've just extended the "review" for another six months, because that'll make the difference. But no matter how much they look, they ain't gonna find what ain't there. Of course, they don't expect to -- they're merely creating drama. Think maybe good Pennsylvania taxpayers might be sick of their legislature using their money to create more drama? Reader, I think so.

Stand.Earth helps you tell the state of California to stop buying oil from the Amazon rainforest. For a whole lot of reasons! Oil drilling in the Amazon threatens the world's greatest climate change fighter -- they don't call the Amazon rainforest the "lungs of the Earth" for nothing! -- plus it also threatens the numerous Indigenous folks who live there and who spend far too much of their time fighting developers. Don't believe the hype that "gas costs too much in California so we need to get it anywhere we can." That's how evil gets you -- by exploiting you when you're not at your best. They'd do much better expanding public transportation -- yes, even in California! -- so they can be stronger the next time evil strikes.

More Perfect Union helps you tell state governments to stop allowing big corporations to force state legislators to sign non-disclosure agreements. I've been talking about this issue perhaps too abstractly, though I still find the theoretical problem -- of forcing state legislators not to talk about issue with their bosses, their constituents! -- to be rather comical. Fact is, Amazon (the big corporation, this time) has been forcing non-disclosure agreements on politicians in places they've tried to build warehouses. What could Amazon be trying to hide? Tax breaks they don't deserve, their awful record with COVID-19, their general hatred of unionized workers? Whatever it is, folks deserve to know.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell Verizon to stop carrying the notorious One America News Network. DirecTV dumped them this past April, now it's everyone else's turn! How do you know OAN deserves oblivion? Because they sued Rachel Maddow for defamation after she called them "literally paid Russian propaganda" -- and lost. Meanwhile they're the defendant in at least one other defamation suit concerning the lies they spread about the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost by seven million votes. No, it's no "victory" for "free speech" if they still get to spew filth; nothing in our Constitution guarantees a paid platform for your free speech, only protection from your government oppressing you for your speech.

Action: concerning law and order, drug prices, windfall profits, big ag monopolies, and the Shenandoah.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the 4th Amendment is Not for Sale Act, lower drug prices, pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations, and pass the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act and the Shenandoah Mountain Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2738/S. 1265, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. This bill would prevent third-party data-gobblers from selling your personal data to law enforcement; our laws presently only prevent ISPs from selling that info, so we gotta close that loophole. The news hook right now is data-gobblers selling data on everyone who visited a Planned Parenthood for any reason -- and you can see why folks would be a little scared about that -- but fact is data brokers shouldn't be selling your personal data to law enforcement, and law enforcement shouldn't be able to get that data without a warrant. I know, warrants, how quaint.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk, for the umpteenth time, to lower prescription drug prices so good Americans don't go broke buying life-saving drugs. I don't know how many more times I have to talk about diabetics rationing their insulin before they get the picture, but duty is duty and they will get the picture. And how about that: lowering prices as an inflation-fighting tool, since that's literally what it is. Right-wingers call that "price controls" like that's a dirtier phrase than price-gouging. I suspect most Americans would say you want to control prices? What are you waiting for? My EpiPen shouldn't cost $600!

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. Gas prices go through the roof, and big oil corporations make record profits -- c'mon, we're not schmucks. I'm old enough to remember when big corporations took the hit in profits rather than pass costs on to their customers, but we're a sick, immoral, and decadent society now, so corporations make us pay. And yeah, I've noticed the smaller gas stations have the lower prices! But let's not have small businesses carry an entire civilization on their backs, OK? Big oil corporations won't do the right thing until we make them.

Food and Water Watch helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7827/S. 4245, the Food and Agribusiness Merger Moratorium and Antitrust Review Act, which would set some limits on mergers in the agricultural sector. I'm old enough to remember when "big corporate farms eating up small farms" seemed to be the plot of every Hollywood movie! And it's so, so much worse now! Small farmers confront large monopoly power at almost every turn, and again, we should not ask the small farmer to shoulder responsibility for an entire civilization. Curbing mergers in big ag right now will at least give the small farmer some breathing room. And that's all the small farmer ever asks for.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass S. 3911, the Shenandoah Mountain Act, which would permanently protect some 90,000 acres of the renowned Shenandoah Mountain area. This, again, is simple: we can protect one of the last undeveloped areas of the southern Appalachians, so good Americans and their children and their children's children can enjoy it -- or we can churn it up for energy that will disappear almost as soon as it's unearthed and mines and pipelines that'll spill filth into our drinking water. And no, we shouldn't churn up the area just to "create jobs." Preserving areas also creates jobs, for those who work to preserve it and those who help others enjoy it.

Around the table: in which we confront horrible truths about security, renewables, and campaigns.

Salon asks Brennan Center scholar Elizabeth Goitein "(w)hat would have been the worst-case outcome on Jan. 6." The answer? A military coup. And yet many Presidential emergency powers, granted through law by Congress, could also have wreaked havoc -- the Insurrection Act of course, but also the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which lets Presidents freeze bank accounts of Americans suspected of collaborating with a foreign power, and the Communications Act, which may allow our President to flip a kill-switch on our internet. And that's before we get to the emergency powers Presidents claim to have in the rarely-seen-I-wonder-why Presidential Emergency Action Documents.

In a related note, Branko Marketic at Jacobin tells us why we should be wary a domestic anti-terrorism bill like the one our House passed last week. Long story short: the bill isn't as repugnant as something Republicans would push and have pushed, but that's not a high bar to clear, and one could easily imagine its mechanisms being turned against liberals, as, indeed, all the other mechanisms of "national security" already have been. The Biden Administration still harasses anti-racism activists far too much, and a future Trump Administration (until the man dies, no sense imagining it'll be some other Republican) will do considerably worse.

When one hears that "Supply Chain Failures Prove Growing Need for Localized Economies," particularly with regard to food, one is right to ask: how do we help recreate local economies? The article suggests more than a few ways to do that -- from supporting mutual aid groups and farmers' markets all the way up to fighting "free" trade deals and supporting seed banks. We should also note that our FTC's proposed merger guidelines (which could also undo mergers) could be a good ally in this fight -- if we can keep corporations from getting absurdly huge, we can also keep them from throwing our lives into chaos at will.

This Harper's-style list about corporate involvement in spreading the "Great Replacement" theory should disabuse any notions we might have that corporations are somehow too "woke." Many corporations find racists to be useful idiots, since they distract folks from what the corporations are doing. It's like they're saying yeah, you did catch me polluting your water table, but before you shoot me, have you ever considered how Black and Brown folks get all the goodies and you can't get anything? And the reason you "can't get anything" is corporate power! And too many folks remember the good times, without remembering that reining in corporate power and taxing the rich were how we got the good times.

Arguing against renewable energy because of the extractive/exploitative effects of lithium mining sure is better than merely saying ha ha you're using coal to power your electric car! or passing around pictures of supposed "electric car graveyards" on Facebook, but it's no reason to throw up our hands and say we're just going to have to use oil and gas and coal forever, either. And it's also no reason to say every advance in technology exploits someone, as if the Indigenous folks who live near the salt lakes that provide around seven-eighths of all extracted lithium simply don't matter, or don't know better. The can-do thinker, of course, would be thinking past lithium in the first place.

Finally, Democrats are starting to see some of their early redistricting victories/non-losses get reversed in court. "(C)ollapsing across the map" is overly dramatic, but that's not the real issue: the real issue is that no Democrat should lose to any of these insane Republicans, and like the baseball manager who's already complaining about injuries three weeks into the season, Democratic politicians seem to be psyching themselves into doing just that. I sure hope I don't find out that it's always been about locking in the big campaign donations! After all, if you win, you have to do things, but if you lose, you can keep fundraising off the knuckle-dragger you just enabled to victory.

Around the table: in which someone actually proposes saddling all elections with an Electoral College.

This FactCheck article does a pretty good job summarizing our recent baby formula issues. I'm reminded that when you hear "should immigrant babies get formula before American babies?" that a better question would be: so babies don't deserve formula merely because they're immigrants? And if the answer is "well, not before our babies do," then ask why the Greatest Nation on Earth should have to choose. Marcus Aurelius would shake his head at all of that.

Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate wants to bring the Electoral College to Colorado statewide elections! Why a man would think "doing away with the popular vote for statewide elected officials" is a winning message is a bit of a mystery. If he were to somehow succeed in this nefarious plan, I can't say for sure our Supreme Court would strike it down, even though precedent commands it. Perhaps Sam Alito would say one-person-one-vote isn't a deeply-rooted enough right.

An anti-price-gouging bill aimed at oil corporations -- not the Windfall Profits Tax Act, but not a bad bill -- barely passed the House, with four House Democrats joining all Republicans in voting against it. Naturally Democrat anti-bill arguments were all hostage-taking: if we fight price-gouging, what will we do when we need more oil later? Why, you could argue against almost anything that way! If we put this CEO in jail for butchering his secretary and drinking her blood and eating the flesh from her bones, what'll we do when we need his leadership later? Of course, a truly great nation wouldn't need to answer that, because a truly great nation would train its people up into greatness. Clearly we've failed there with folks like Rep. Kathleen Rice, last heard helping to scuttle efforts to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

Hamilton Nolan at In These Times tells us that the Amazon Labor Union victory in Staten Island, NY, requires organizers to recognize that "all of the time unions spend arguing with one another over who has the right to organize which workers, in which industry, at which company is one gargantuan waste of time." You'd think unions would already have thought of that, being on the ropes for the last 40-odd years as the share of union workers in the economy has dwindles from around 33% to around 10%, but then being on the ropes against an economy that seems to grow more diabolical by the day may make you inclined to cling to what you've been doing and tell yourself you just need to do it harder. Still, as Mr. Nolan says, "(b)uilding multi-union coalitions requires unions to recognize the futility of arguing over jurisdiction, and instead do the opposite: combine forces and organize without freaking out over who gets to put their label on the end product."

When I read David Brooks telling us that liberals need to stop looking down on right-wingers and pretending that only they have a monopoly on understanding right and wrong, I am tempted to replace the word "liberal" with the word "right-winger" everywhere in that op-ed and guess what? It works about as well that way; liberals certainly have no monopoly on believing their way is the only way. David Brooks apparently didn't hear any right-wingers calling Iraq war opponents traitors 20 years ago, let alone right-wingers constantly calling liberals weak since time immemorial, and that's the kind of blind spot that'll never help you ingratiate yourself with your new Democrat friends. (And those of us who do not imagine a wall between what Mr. Brooks calls the "moral freedom" ethos and the "you are not your own" ethos won't be persuaded, or even enriched, by the last 36 paragraphs. We certainly won't be convinced that the conservative worldview's "existential()...crisis" is a recent phenomenon. That carcass has been stinking up the joint for years.)

Finally, a right-winger actually tells Congress, under oath, that "places like Washington, D.C." use fetuses to power street lamps. As with right-wing efforts to call everyone who doesn't beat up a gay person a "groomer," I think legal remedies already exist to redress such absurdities. Never mind that she actually said that under oath; anyone can pretend they thought what they said was true as far as they "knew." No, someone with standing to sue needs to sue her -- someone with decision-making power in the D.C. utility grid, perhaps? And no, her saying "places like Washington, D.C." won't give her wiggle room; everyone knows what she meant. Playing whack-a-mole with these lies won't save us, but getting the liars to pay in a court of law might.

Action: concerning climate change, corruption, pollution, mine reclamation, and peaceful protests.

Long story short: tell Home Depot to stop using the Canadian boreal forest for its products, tell our government to investigate FDA corruption in re our baby formula shortage, tell our Army Corps of Engineers to examine pollution from pipelines more vigorously, tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, and tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the removal of peaceful protestors outside Supreme Court Justices' houses. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Environmental Action helps you tell Home Depot to stop sourcing its wood products from the Canadian boreal forest. Our reasoning is the same for our world's largest intact forest as it would be with the Amazon rainforest or the Tongass National Forest: old trees are our best weapon against climate change; they don't call them "the lungs of the planet" for nothing. Thus turning them into cabinets or toilet paper is, in this context, rather short-sighted. And if we can prompt the world's largest hardware store into abandoning logging in the forest, we'll likely get others to follow. If not, the Big Stick of Bad PR is always ready for deployment.

Progress America helps you tell our government to investigate our Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) for its role in our current baby formula shortage. And I don't care what corruption at our FDA this uncovers! If you don't want to get shamed and shunned by your civilization, then don't hurt people. Chances are that investigators will find that the revolving door between industry and our FDA doesn't help us deal with food safety crises, and they might also find that our FDA has given established baby formula-manufacturing corporations too much of a free pass on safety inspections. That'd be a shame to learn that, but knowledge is power.

The Climate Reality Project helps you tell our Army Corps of Engineers to close the loopholes that big oil and gas drilling corporations use to evade scrutiny about the pollution their proposed pipelines cause. Specifically, we'll call for less "fast-tracking" of pipelines. We should be "fast-tracking" solar and wind projects, if we must "fast-track" anything at all! Yet big oil and gas drilling corporations constantly assert that their pipelines are "too urgent" to ensure they don't spew filth into our water tables. But no one will be sitting around a campfire in a hundred years saying we can't drink the water now, but at least CEOs made good money for a while!

The Sierra Club helps you tell President Biden to nominate a Director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. We should blame our Senate for dragging their feet on confirming Mr. Biden's nominees, but this one's on our President, because he hasn't even put a name forward. The long name gives you the idea that this is some bureaucratic rando, but with all the coal mines closing up around America, reclaiming and repurposing that land becomes a lot more important, and someone's got to run things at the department that would do that work. And, ah, this is the kind of thing that actually helps potential Trump voters in Appalachia. So how about we do it?

Finally, FAIR helps you tell the Washington Post to stop calling for the repression of peaceful protesting outside of Supreme Court Justice's homes. They actually suggested these protestors were totalitarians! By suggesting that they were "(e)rasing any distinction between the public square and private life"! Key word there, of course, is any -- protesting outside of the private homes of public figures who have, very publicly, made known their opposition to the popular will does not erase literally "any" distinctions between public and private spheres. And, ah, who exactly "harassed" or "intimidated" these Justices? If anything, protestors have been too polite.

Action: concerning baby formula, Medicare for All, paid leave, drug prices, and price-gouging.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to fix the baby formula crisis, expand Medicare to include all Americans, pass paid family/sick leave, lower drug prices and expand home health care, and pass a windfall profits tax on oil and gas corporations. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. You've heard of the national baby formula shortage, which is a matter of life and death for a lot of babies? Matt Stoller explains why it's happening -- short answer: monopolies -- and prescribes solutions, which you may call your Congressfolk about. These solutions include: temporarily allowing baby formula imports, particularly from nations with good (or better) food safety regulations; restructuring food stamp markets so they don't create baby formula monopolies; and breaking up our FDA so that one agency doesn't regulate both food and drugs. We may not get the change we need right away, but if we keep at it, it will. And if we do nothing, we'll get nothing.

National Nurses United helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Medicare to include all Americans. Medicare for All will cover more folks for less money, end of story. Don't believe me? Believe the right-wing Mercatus Center, which tabulated the cost of Medicare for All at $32 trillion over 10 years -- or some $17 trillion less than the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid's forecast of all health care spending over the next decade. How do you pay for it, then? Simple: assess an employer-side payroll tax (meaning workers don't pay it!) amounting to what big corporations already pay for the private health insurance that rejects your claims for no good reason and doesn't cover everyone.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family and sick leave for all Americans. Since right-wingers constantly squeal WHEREZ WILLZ YOUZ FINDZ TEH MONEYZ!!!!!, I'll note that Sen. Gillibrand's original bill would have funded it with a 0.4% payroll tax (half paid by the employer, half by the worker), which, for someone making $50,000 annually, would amount to a little over $8 a month. $8! So everyone can take time off to take care of their kids, or their parents, or their grandparents, or themselves when they need to. And I'd fund it by bringing back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income and the 55% tax on corporate profits, which wouldn't be "socialism" so much as "what we did in the 1950s."

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices and expand at-home health care services. Most people want these things, so why can't Congress do it? Because Republicans won't do it! And also because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema won't do it, because they think they're so much smarter than everyone else! In 2 1/2 years if not sooner, these fools will be shown the error of their ways; wouldn't it be nice if a massive popular outcry helped them see the error of their ways sooner? That goes for your Republican Reps and Senators, too. If enough of us speak out, then doing nothing will actually get them fired for once.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big oil corporations. Because sky-high prices shouldn't lead to sky-high profits! I'm old enough to remember when corporations didn't raise prices solely because of increased costs. Why? Partly because shame still meant something back then, and also partly because we had fewer monopolies then, so we had a higher chance of finding a corporation that wouldn't rob you merely because it had the opportunity. Now they just gouge us because they can. If we pass a windfall profits tax on them, then they can't.

Action: concerning law and order, pollution, labor, corruption, and privatization.

Long story short: tell Texas Gov. Abbott to grant Melissa Lucio clemency, tell Citigroup to get out of the Amazon rainforest, tell Verizon to recognize retail worker unions, tell our EPA to cut pollution from trucks and buses, tell our government to investigate Postmaster General DeJoy, and tell BlueTriton to stop taking the public's water. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first: Ultra Violet helps you tell Texas Governor Greg Abbott to grant Melissa Lucio clemency. A jury convicted Ms. Lucio of murdering her two year-old daughter in 2007, but, well, let's just say it's a bad sign for a verdict when five of the original jurors want a do-over because of evidence they didn't get to hear, evidence that included how thoroughly investigators coerced her to confess in the first place. I'm sure some folks would rather just adhere to the original verdict, not out of laziness but out of a sense that we've got rules, but I think they're misguided: one of the ways we protect our civilization is we make damn sure someone's guilty before we do something like kill them, since you can't really take that back. Erring on the side of innocence is a feature of civilization; too many folks think it's a bug.

Stand.Earth helps you tell Citigroup executives to stop funding oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest. Yes, that still happens, and not just because Jair Bolsonaro runs things in Brazil! But Citigroup executives meet today for their Annual General Meeting, so now's as good a time as any to wield the Big Stick of Bad PR against them. They've funded oil drilling in the Amazon -- the world's best weapon against climate change, I feel compelled to restate -- to the tune of $40 billion over the years, which doesn't just mean pollution, but also means running roughshod over the rights of indigenous folks who live there. And yeah, it also means collaborating with the aforementioned irredeemable asshole whom I hope Brazilian voters will be able to turn out of office this year. Yeah, I said collaborating. As Rush Limbaugh used to say, words mean things.

More Perfect Union helps you tell Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg to recognize the Verizon retail workers' union in Washington state. Stop me if you've heard this before, but Verizon made over $4 billion in profits while cutting retail worker pay, which I guess is how they answer the question how do you think I got so rich? Verizon workers also suffer from the chronic understaffing and absurd scheduling practices that plague so many retail workers in America; could that be the reason Starbucks and Amazon workers are trying to unionize? Don't believe the hype that retail jobs are just unstable and workers should know that when they sign up. As if they have much of a choice! And anyway, calling misery "natural" betrays a profound lack of imagination.

Consumer Reports helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to cut pollution from buses and semi-trucks. Again, throwing up your hands and saying they're big vehicles and they're just going to pollute! shows a profound lack of imagination. Semis and buses pump out a quarter of all pollution from vehicals despite comprising only five percent of all vehicles, and if they only get, say six miles to the gallon, wouldn't they be twice as clean if they got 12? This is the kind of imagination that makes good policy! You can't just sit there and say we'll never get them to get 50 miles to the gallon, so let's give up, but right-wingers want you to make that mistake non-stop, because then their paymasters (like big corporations that don't want to buy all new trucks) get everything they want. And why should they?

Daily Kos helps you tell our Department of Justice and United States Postal Service Inspector General to investigate Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for possible lawbreaking -- specifically, by holding onto investments in the corporation that just so happened to produce all those free COVID tests we got in the mail. No, it's not a matter of using your connections in the business world! For one thing, our government should have made the damn tests themselves, and for another thing, you're not supposed to personally benefit from the decisions you make on behalf of the public. I'm old enough to remember when public servants avoided the appearance of corruption; now they wave it in your face. Waving it in our face should get them punished, but it won't, unless we act.

Finally, Sum of Us helps you tell BlueTriton CEO Dean Metropoulos to stop taking public water from the drought-addled communities, or, indeed, any communities. BlueTriton, as you likely know by now, used to be Nestlé’s North American water stealing ahem bottling operation last year, but it's time we reminded the world there ain't no putting lipstick on that pig. And why should there be? Why should corporations get to siphon public water and then charge hundreds of times the amount they paid for the water? They call it "preserving a resource," but governments can do that. The most important thing here is that water doesn't go the way of health insurance, higher education, child care, and, hell, rent -- as an essential item that working families can't afford anymore.

Action: concerning monopolies, drug prices, gas prices, campaign finance, forced arbitration, immigration, and internet policy.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and the Open App Markets App, tax the windfall profits of big oil corporations, pass a Constitutional amendment that would allow campaign finance law again, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, reject any bill that would force President Biden to reinstate Title 42, and confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

With the news that both H.R. 5017/S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act, and H.R. 3816/S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee by large bipartisan margins, it's time to tell Senate Majority Leader Schumer (whose contact information you may find here) to put the bills on the floor, not wait for "commitments" from 60 Senators. Because that's a stalling tactic! Both of these bills would strike blows against big tech monopolists, so our Senate should pass them. While you've got him on the line, tell him to put H.R. 6833, the Affordable Insulin Now Act, up for a vote as well. The bill would cap insulin prices, and "waiting to see how the broader reconciliation bill goes" is another stalling tactic! We already know how it'll go: Joe Manchin will string us along for six months and then say he just can't get there. Enough already.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to tax big oil corporation windfall profits. Right-wingers will say that's "taxing success," but it's actually taxing greed, or taxing price-gouging, either one will do. Every time they call something like that "taxing success," they murder a part of our world, because they help condition folks into thinking corruption equals success. We've got to get back to the society that equates corruption with evil. Anyway, just four big oil corporations made over $70 billion in profits last year, and brook no silliness about how that's only six cents per gallon or whatever, because hello! $70 billion! You can't just slice $70 billion into ladyfingers. Next up on the right-wing noise machine: CEOs are underpaid because they only make 12 cents for every breath they draw!

Common Cause helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.J.Res. 80, which would amend our Constitution to allow governments to regulate campaign finance like sane people again. Let me be clear: nobody but a troll gets up in the morning and says praise the Lord corporations can spend as much money as they want on stupid campaign ads that put us all in a crappy mood! We actually live in a world where two-thirds of Republican voters want the kind of campaign finance laws that our Supreme Court outlawed in their notorious Citizens United v. FEC ruling, so we should pass H.J.Res. 80. Brook no slippery-slope arguments from right-wingers! A Constitutional amendment will not open the floodgates for all kinds of free speech restrictions, not least because money is not speech.

Daily Kos, Public Justice, and Public Citizen all help you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Why do so many good government groups want us to pass this bill? Because forced arbitration is awful! It forces people to redress grievances with corporations through arbitration rather than court, and guess what? You're far more likely to lose in arbitration -- it doesn't matter that oh, but the average award is bigger in arbitration if you lose. And not for nothing, but forced arbitration is yet another one of those monopolistic practices by which corporations fix wages. And since wages are the price an employer pays for your labor, wage fixing is also price fixing, and price fixing, as we know, is illegal. Judges don't call it that enough, but we're working on that.

The Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any bill that would preserve the notorious Title 42 immigration policy. Title 42 supposedly aimed to keep immigrants from making the COVID pandemic worse, and guess what? It didn't work -- with their whining about masks and vaccines, right-wing Americans kept that pandemic going quite well by themselves, thank you very much. No, the Trump Administration came up with the Title 42 program just to give them another reason to keep immigrants out of America, and too many Democratic politicians are going all Henny Penny at the prospect of even more immigrants, and the Republican attacks that will come with them. But failing to do the right thing on immigration because Republicans will attack us for it is cowardice. Which, again, Democratic politicians are good at.

Finally, FAIR helps you tell your Senators to confirm Gigi Sohn as FCC Commissioner. All you need know about her nomination? That the Wall Street Journal doesn't want her on it, out of a "fear" that she'll "silence conservative voices." Oddly, both the One America News Network and Newsmax have supported her nomination! If the Wall Street Journal thinks net neutrality (which Ms. Sohn would help restore) amounts to "censorship" of "conservative voices," that's their problem, because net neutrality -- which would prevent internet service providing corporations from delivering some files faster than others -- is not censorship. Like "conservative" and "socialist," "censorship" has become a word its users torture until it tells them what they want to hear. But we don't do any kind of torture here.

Around the table: they're banning *math textbooks*! And other absurdities.

When I heard that the Florida Department of Education had rejected 41 math textbooks for various reasons, including "references to critical race theory," I found the tale was so absurd I wondered if media outlets were overplaying it. Apparently they are not! Even though Florida also said they'd rejected the math books for "inclusions of Common Core" and "the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics," I noticed they put their objections to critical race theory first, so I guess this really must be mostly about math books containing word problems about Tony and Aisha taking a train together. Banning math books is weapons-grade PR, of course -- for the Democrat who actually uses it! Don't worry about being civil, gang, because Republicans never do.

You won't be surprised to hear that child care and elder care programs can reduce inflation, even though it's the opposite of the Gospel According to Republicans and Joe Manchin. They're still complaining that those $1,400 checks you got a year ago have caused all this inflation, and not the greed of corporations making record profits. Anyway, child care and elder care both cost an arm and a leg -- because what are you gonna do, not get it? -- and thus subsidizing these things can help working families fight the effects of inflation. No, that won't cause more inflation! Remember: corporate greed causes inflation, and we've got tools against that, like good tax policy and strong antitrust enforcement.

When I hear that "Liberal Cities Are Not Immune to Mounting Attacks on Abortion Rights," I remember that cities are actually pretty diverse, and that while a lot of folks in them vote Democrat mainly because the alternative is untenable, not everyone who does that is pro-choice, and the anti-abortion movement can peel some of those folks off, and in the long run maybe even convert them to Free Marketeers. And sadly, though my world is big enough for a liberal anti-abortion group, the "Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising" hangs out with too many right-wing nutjobs to be that group.

Here's something we should be saying a lot more: "Ron DeSantis loves using very young kids as political props." The phrase "using children" should be weapons-grade PR enough, frankly, particularly when you're surrounding yourself with children as you sign anti-abortion legislation and anti-education legislation. It works the other way for him, too, when you recall that he bullied a group of college students into taking their masks off because wearing them, he said, was "COVID theater." That man sure does know all about theater, that's for sure. But not a whole lot about leadership.

At last someone else sees why Ron Johnson keeps winning Senate elections in Wisconsin -- not just because Democrats prepare for victory so badly, but because Mr. Johnson himself sounds like a jerk on right-wing radio but then seems so nice on his TV ads. Something for everyone! Democrats hammering him on how he personally benefited from the 2017 tax "reform" might work, but Democrats showing off his two-faced nature to everyone might also work. Some folks will secretly root for a guy who "sticks it to the man" by getting himself a tax cut -- this, even though the taxpayer is "the man" here -- but folks like liars a lot less.

Finally, I guess I'm not surprised that President Biden has reopened fossil fuel drilling leases on public lands -- legalese aside, the guy can do very little about the corporate greed that's actually driving inflation, but he has to at least look like he's doing something, though giving out a lease doesn't produce more gas tomorrow. But I am a little surprised (and pleased!) that his Administration raised the royalty rate for drilling on public lands by 50%; oil and gas drilling corporations will whine about having to pay the taxpayer more for the privilege of drilling on public lands (i.e., our lands), and sadly that could well mean that President Biden changes his mind! I sure hope not, though. If we're going to have drilling on public lands, let's at least make some bank. And if the "high price of drilling" scares oil and gas drilling corporations away, well, I'll just have to deal with it.

Action: concerning taxes, paid family leave, child care, forced arbitration, the right to repair, and electric mail trucks.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to restore the Child Tax Credit expansion, enact a windfall profits tax on oil and gas corporations, pass paid family leave and child care subsidy legislation, outlaw forced arbitration clauses in all contracts, pass more expansive right-to-repair legislation, and force our Postal Service to use more electric trucks. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to restore the expired Child Tax Credit expansion, which resulted in monthly checks of $250 and $300 (per child!) going to working family bank accounts. In a nation where about 40% of Americans literally do not have $400 for an emergency, getting a check near that amount every month for six months was, as a famous philosopher might say, a BFD, and if you've ever had a family, you know making ends meet every month is tough. Strange, then, that Joe Manchin not only said that the CTC expansion (and not, you know, monopoly power or corporate greed) was the "main driver of inflation," but that CTC expansion recipients just spent their extra money on drugs! Let's make sure stupid ideas like that never win the day in America again.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. With gas prices going through the roof because of corporate greed, this bill would both enact a tax on profits we can tell come from price-gouging and then remit a payment of around $250 to American families making less than $75,000. You know, in case Joe Manchin whines about "means testing" and whatnot. $250 ain't a big check, I know, but it'll also buy around five tanks of gas in most cars, and again, with some 40% of Americans not able to cough up even $400 in an emergency, a $250 check ain't a bad thing to have. It also shouldn't provoke right-wingers into whining about Big Gummint Handouts. I kid, of course -- right-wingers are always whining about something.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact family-friendly policies, like paid family leave and child care subsidies, into their next spending bill. Yeah, Joe Manchin was against these policies, too, but I guess we can't expect folks who literally don't remember a time when they couldn't just take a day off literally any time they wanted to be too understanding of those of us who can't. Nor can we expect folks who have literally never had any trouble finding the money to raise their kids to be all that tuned into those of us who do have trouble covering child care. But that's why we're here -- to remind (or, if necessary, educate) our leaders about our troubles and how they might help fix them. I mean, your personal experience should be a guide to further exploration, not a walled city that keeps everyone else out.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Our House has already passed this bill! However, unlike with the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, which enjoyed actual bipartisan support, our House passed the more expansive Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act (which would apply to all contracts, be they employment contracts or consumer contracts) on a largely party-line vote, with a mere one Republican vote in support. You'll never guess who, either: Matt Gaetz of Florida! Yes, that Matt Gaetz! Never let it be said that I didn't show Matt Gaetz in his best light. Anyway, this means we'll need to work harder on our Senators to pass this bill, but we're up for that.

Consumer Reports helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 4006/S. 3830, the Fair Repair Act. Yeah, I know, the Agricultural Right to Repair Act is still out there and probably has a better chance of passing -- after all, who wants to vote against a bill that lets farmers fix their tractors? -- but fact is we all deserve the right to repair, and manufacturing corporations that keep the information we need to repair something we own from all of us. Gosh, if you own it, shouldn't you be able to fix it? Do big corporations need to keep having power over you after you've bought their product? I'm old enough to remember being able to replace my processor and RAM chips in my laptop, but now they make them harder to fix, plus they herd you into their repair shops, rather than yours. And that just doesn't seem pro-freedom, you know?

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to require that our Postal Service uses at least 75% electric trucks. What's the vehicle you see the most in your neighborhood? A mail truck! So if we can get the most common vehicle we see to be electric, we'd be fighting climate change more than if we bought an electric car for ourselves. And if you're thinking electric trucks aren't "powerful" enough to last, remember that mail trucks don't do a whole lot of highway driving or a whole lot of speeding! Lastly, don't fall prey to the whole ALL TEH ELECTRICKZ COMEZ FROMZ TEH COALZ!!!!! rubbish. Most states produce at least some of their electricity from renewables now, plus electric vehicles don't pump out carbon emissions like gas-powered ones do.

Around the table: Vlad the Bad as rational actor, and other horrible truths.

University of New Haven scholar Matthew Schmidt discusses the Russian war on Ukraine, and he makes a lot of sense: the Russian military ain't so hot, the Ukrainian military is very, very good, Vlad the Bad tried to win the war in the first week and doesn't seem prepared for failing in that, and yes he might use nukes on the battlefield in order to break the stalemate. Even so, Mr. Schmidt tells us Vlad the Bad is a rational actor, "following his own system of logic" where Russia is "the center of this geographic and cultural and spiritual space known as Eurasia," and Ukraine becoming more "Western" threatens that space. Where does it end? Likely with "the destruction of the Putinist regime," perhaps years from now.

Former Missouri half-term Governor Eric Greitens, now running for Senate, doubles down against his ex-wife's allegations of physical abuse (against both her and their children) in their custody battle, saying "truth will always prevail." He can ask Sean Parnell about that! Of course, Mr. Parnell had basically lost his custody battle when he bowed out of the Pennsylvania Senate race; the Greitens' battle isn't nearly as far along. But I can't help but think that that Eric Schmitt's $1.6 million fund-raising haul at Mar-a-Lago is more on his mind as he calculates all his denials -- and he calculates them to reach Trump votaries, who respond viscerally (and supportively!) to men who deny serious wrongdoing.

ProPublica finds the famous St. Jude's Children’s Research Hospital actually trying to muscle donors' families for bequests -- occasionally trying to get of children and other relatives disinherited in court! -- and that's a far more scathing indictment of their corporate character, I think, than their irregular-but-not-nonexistent support for parents visiting their kids. Says one person who actually beat St. Jude's in court over his father's estate: "Think of all the fees for lawyers that didn’t go to St. Jude, not one child, not one cancer patient." Maybe St. Jude's will respond that it's worth it because they get around double the national average in donations from wills and they use that money to keep massive medical bills from destroying families, but using probate as a weapon toward that end is evil, and anyway it should be civilization's aim to keep massive medical bills from destroying families, not St. Jude's.

When I hear that politicians like Blake Masters (running for Senate in Arizona) and J.D. Vance (running for same in Ohio) get their talking points from Tucker Carlson rather than Donald Trump, I question whether Mr. Carlson will ever have the same power as Mr. Trump, since Mr. Carlson projects neither the self-made myth or the tough-guy myth as well. And when I hear that all three gentlemen "sympathiz(e) with Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical worldview," I'd say Democrats have an easy retort, if they have the guts to use it: I'll take American values over Putin's anytime. I don't even care that they pretend to be economic populists, because so did Mr. Trump, and that did very little for us. (Hate to pile on, but if Blake Masters really can't imagine a liberal driving a logging truck, that's a failure of his imagination.)

In the wake of record-high gas prices, a Hart Research Associates/League of Conservation Voters/Climate Power poll finds that 87% of Americans think Congress should do something about oil corporation profiteering, with 80% specifically endorsing a windfall profits tax. 80% of the people support it, you say? You know what that means: Kyrsten Sinema will soon come out against it, because "bipartisanship"! And Joe Manchin will come out against it, because I just can't get there. But you know, folks like the Joker and the Penguin are playing the game like it's 2011, when that "we can't raise taxes on the rich because it'll hurt small businesses" lie still had a bit of cred; they now operate in a world where virtually everyone thinks oil corporations raised gas prices just because they could.

Finally, voting rights groups have sued a group that's named themselves the U.S. Election Integrity Plan for sending armed members into Black and Brown neighborhoods in Colorado to "question" them about their voting habits. Occasionally, they wear badges, pretend to be from "the county," accuse folks of voting illegally, and take photos of their houses, but I question the Bannon/Lindell axis's wisdom in choosing Colorado for this little adventure -- they're a lot more likely to run into armed liberals there than, say, Connecticut. I'm also bummed this is a civil suit, because I'd rather these clowns go to jail for a long, long time. I mean, c'mon, law and order, folks!

Action: concerning taxes, drug prices, paid sick leave, child care, and Oak Flat.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on billionaires, millionaires, and corporations, enact a windfall tax on oil corporations, lower drug prices, pass paid sick leave and child care legislation, and pass the Save Oak Flat Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on billionaires, while Americans for Tax Fairness still helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a surtax on millionaires and raise corporate taxes. Billionaires made about $2 trillion during this pandemic while we struggled to make ends meet, and a wealth tax (of roughly 2% on wealth over $1 billion) would raise a lot of money. A millionaire surtax would essentially raise the top tax rates on millionaire income by five to eight percentage points, which wouldn't be the 91% rate I want to bring back, but which would do a lot of good. And, of course, we need to tell the 50 Republicans plus Kyrsten Sinema they're wrong about corporate taxes every chance we get. So let's get back to it.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7061/S. 3802, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. I didn't know the other day that the bill -- in addition to taxing big oil profits whenever they decide to use inflation or Ukraine (or whatever!) as a cover for hiking the price of gas -- would remit the money it collects from big oil corporations back to working families making less than $150,000 (or, if only one parent works, $112,500), which should help the folks hardest hit by price hikes endure them a little better. Now let's see how many Republicans decide to go on record as voting against taxing big oil corporations and rebating that money back to good Americans. West Virginians, please clog Joe Manchin's phone lines; I don't want him giving those Republicans any more cover.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to, well, lower drug prices for all Americans. The news hook this time? Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told Politico that "if we want to reduce drug prices, then we need to do it now," because of "the difficulty of passing something like this in a Republican Congress." In other words, if Republicans win back our House and Senate, they simply won't do it; that's a hell of an admission from the man who'd be Senate Pro Tempore again if Republicans take back the Senate, and it allows his 2022 opponents a campaign angle: if you want to reduce drug prices, replace Charles Grassley with me. Anyway, we already know that Congress won't do a damn thing unless we make it impossible for them not to do it, and that starts with communicating your will to your Reps and Senators until they get it.

Moms Rising helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund paid family/sick leave. Yes, 50 Republicans and Joe Manchin don't want it, but they're wrong there, too -- why, even a lot of CEOs will tell them that paid sick leave at least gives them some certainty as they deal with employee absenteeism. And the United States is virtually alone in the world in not providing some sort of paid sick leave to working families. Sen. Gillibrand's bills all funded paid sick leave with a tiny payroll tax, amounting to about $8 every month for workers making $50,000 annually; I'd prefer to tax the rich for that as well -- I mean, really, when is Jeff Bezos going to spend $180 billion? You can only go to the edge of space so many times with so many Star Trek actors before it gets old! -- but that should demonstrate how easy it'd be to fund it.

Moms Rising also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass child care legislation much like Senator Murray proposed in recent legislation and President Biden included in the Build Back Better Act. Basically, it would subsidize child care so that working families pay no more than 7% of their income in child care, and that's become a big expense for folks anymore, and you know why? Same reason college and health care have become such a big expense for folks anymore: they can't do without it. This ain't a "free" market at work, this is a captive market at work, and our government has to step in anywhere a captive market develops. What can right-wingers say in response? Don't have kids? Be happy you have jobs? I kid, of course -- right-wingers can't say anything about that, which is why they yammer on so much about critical race theory.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1884/S. 915, the Save Oak Flat Act. You recall former Arizona Sens. Flake and McCain delivering the Oak Flat region of the Tonto National Forest to the big mining corporation for whom Sen. Flake used to work as a lobbyist? The Save Oak Flat Act would reverse that giveaway, and never lease that land to any mining or fossil fuel corporation again, thus protecting Oak Flat from both pollution and desecration, since Oak Flat is also sacred land to the Apache. Sadly, neither of the Democrats who have replaced Messrs. Flake and McCain (Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly) have joined as co-sponsors of the bill. Arizona residents might as well call them both, though I doubt Ms. Sinema will do anything but laugh at them.

Action: concerning taxes, gas prices, corruption, energy policy, public lands, and saving our Post Office some more.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion, tax the windfall profits of oil and gas corporations, prohibit themselves from trading on the stock market, pass legislation promoting renewable energy, pass legislation protecting public lands and rivers, and confirm two USPS Board of Governors nominees so they can fire Postmaster General DeJoy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Change.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion that put extra $250 and $300 monthly checks into working families' bank accounts. "Don't Take Away Our Monthly Checks," the petition's title reads, and sadly Congress has already done that, because Joe "the Penguin" Manchin said folks spent those checks on drugs, and no, I will neither forget nor forgive that evil lie. And he wonders why no one wants to talk to him these days! In real life, the CTC expansion helped good Americans buy groceries, clothes, and school supplies for their kids, and with so many good Americans still unemployed this time last year, it gave more than a few families breathing room. And now with inflation at almost 8%, wiping out the otherwise impressive gains workers have made in wages over the last year, we should bring it back.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall tax on oil and gas corporations. Gasoline prices have shot up, and big corporations use the Ukraine war as an excuse to do what they were going to do anyway, just as other corporations have used inflation as an excuse to drive other prices up, so we've got to discourage them somehow. Don't listen to your right-wing friends and neighbors when they whine that a windfall tax would "tax success," because, frankly, that demonstrates a very warped view of success. Scientists who develop new vaccines and teachers who help a generation do better are successes, but people who game themselves into a position to price-gouge a nation aren't successes -- they're parasites, and we should deal with them as such.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to prohibit themselves from trading or owning individual stocks. And why should they do that ha ha ha snort say the cynical, but they should do it because it clouds their decision-making and interferes with their oversight duties. If you've got a million bucks invested in a corporation that makes facial recognition software, how likely are you, really, to regulate their lousy racist technology the way you need to? Not likely, one would think. They get so pissy when you don't trust them, but it's not our job, as Americans, to trust them -- it's our job to make them do our will, and hold them accountable when they don't. Making sure they get rich sure doesn't do anything for their bosses, the people.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation that makes renewable energy, not fossil fuels, the future of energy in America. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently issued a rather dire assessment of what we're doing to our planet, but the Russian war on Ukraine has also, I would think, given a lot of good Americans pause about getting fossil fuels from other countries when we've got plenty of sun and wind here at home. Oh, some right-wingers do see this as an opportunity to make our government allow oil and gas drilling everywhere, but oil and gas ain't gonna be around forever, while the sun rises every morning and the wind always comes back. When they said always said oil and gas were more "dependable," they meant that oil and gas delivered executive pay dependably. We gotta do better.

The Pew Charitable Trusts helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a slew of bills that would help keep our public lands and rivers clean. It ain't just wildlife that depends on clean public lands and rivers, after all -- we depend on them, too, to provide clean water and to give us places to go and explore. And small businesses also depend on public lands and rivers, because folks who come to enjoy them need to buy stuff just like we all do. Do we think bait shops and canoeing services support any old pollution because "it's the price of a free market"? Hopefully we won't find too many big corporations convincing people that we've "gone too far" in protecting land and water from development, because once they pollute public lands and rivers, it's hard to bring them back to health. We should know by now that we're better off solving problems before they start.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell your Senators to confirm two more USPS Board of Governors appointees so they can fire our Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. Getting the Postal Service Reform Act passed was important, but we've also got to get Mr. DeJoy out, not just for trying to hamper our Postal Service's ability to get votes where they needed to go, and not just for his allegedly corrupt dealings with former Board of Governors member Ron Bloom, whom President Biden sacked. Fact is, Mr. DeJoy has actually tried to convince everyone that slowing down the mail and charging more for worse service were good ideas, and not some sort of pretext to privatize our Post Office. They're bad ideas, in a can-do America that always finds a way. To deliver life-saving medications, I feel compelled to add.

Around the table: dark money stokes school "debates," and other sad truths.

We've been hearing that dark money from the Koch brothers and other right-wing groups influenced the school safety debate these past few years, but now CMD tells us how. First the Koch brothers promoted virtual charter schools as the ticket to surviving COVID, and then when the economy tanked, they promoted "getting kids back to school right now" so they could get their parents back to work, a strategy that has informed just about every subsequent CDC guidance change that's gone in the wrong direction. Then, when schools began to reopen, you saw all those idiots complaining about kids wearing "diapers" on their faces, but they were getting their info from organizations like the Independent Women's Forum, which alleged that masks promote such disparate maladies as anxiety and tooth decay. Some of those folks, you remember, got violent. The sheer number of bad actors described by the article should impress you, if not also depress you.

Better sit down for the story of how Mesa, AZ Starbucks workers organized, since it involves (among other horrors!) a store manager with leukemia getting forced to work while sick (after blowing the whistle on Starbucks's anti-union practices) and then fired, and a district manager telling that same store manager she should try to "understand" where the person who painted a swastika on her house was "coming from." Starbucks also tried to add two dozen employees to the Mesa store (to counter the pro-union workers, naturally!) and argued before our National Labor Relations Board that workers should organize by the district, not the store, like that argument would convince anyone (seriously, when you buy coffee, do you shop at a store, or do you shop at a district?).

When I hear that our IRS audits households with incomes under $25,000 five times as much as everyone else, my first thought is thanks, Republicans, for defunding the IRS police so they don't go after the big tax evaders and go after low-hanging fruit! My second thought is that the poorest among us are the worst at getting away with not paying taxes, because everyone should know that the more economic power you have, the easier you'll get away with stuff. But turns out the Earned Income Tax Credit (or EITC) is the main magnet that pulls an IRS investigation; we could assume, cynically, that giving out such tax credits makes people corrupt, or we could assume, far more constructively, that we should help people understand the EITC better. And still go after people who abuse it! But we need to go after the big thieves, too.

Let's see if I can explain this clearly: our government is hiding how much taxpayer money they're blowing on the notorious F-35 plane. OK, that wasn't as hard as I thought! The way they're hiding it is a bit confusing -- our Defense Department's Director of Operational Test & Evaluation (or DOT&E) has, in an apparently unprecedented maneuver, released two reports, labeling one of them "controlled classified," hoping you'll think it's an actual classified report. But it's not! Here's another headline you could write about the F-35: "almost $63 billion wasted on this boondoggle over the last two decades." The Biden Administration seems to have actually tried harder to get the F-35 to work, but you can't turn chicken shit into chicken salad.

Larry Nocella at Medium reminds us that the big energy corporations raise gas prices every spring! This year they must be thankful that Russia invaded Ukraine, because more Americans are wise to the "because inflation" excuse. It's stunning to go back over media reports from previous years to find that, yes, big energy corporations hike gas prices about this time every year (except 2020, when that pandemic kept everyone home), and they even write about "why" it happens. Not for nothing, but we should (as Mr. Nocella suggests) teach all teach people to use active verbs, not least because we'll better learn not to confuse human-made phenomena with laws of physics. If doing so collapses economics as a "science," well, we all have to make sacrifices for the greater good.

Finally, in case you were wondering how the QAnon folks were "adapting" to the new political reality after Russia's invasion of Ukraine: they're saying Vlad the Bad is actually bombing American biolabs so he can stop Dr. Fauci from creating the next pandemic! That's some pretty special reasoning, there, the more they try to prove their conspiracy theory, the more difficulties they trip over. Even Donald Trump is desperately trying to convince everyone that he hasn't been Mr. Putin's lapdog all this time, so QAnon will surely see some of their most devoted adherents flee -- though probably not many, since, ah, doctrinal flexibility remains their calling card.

Around the table: from a small victory on Title 42 deportations to a larger victory on plastic recycling.

And now for another exciting chapter of "Partly Good News": the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that President Biden can't deport undocumented families "to places where they will be persecuted or tortured," though our President can still use Title 42 to deport single adults and families that don't face such horrors in their birthplace. The ruling also questions whether Title 42 -- which allows our President to deport folks during a public health emergency -- should be discarded, saying it "looks in certain respects like a relic from an era with no vaccines, scarce testing, few therapeutics and little certainty." Right-wingers will interpret this ruling as a mandate to "let everyone in," but that's lazy. Or do I mean because that's lazy?

I'm linking to this one because of the headline: "Florida Just Passed The ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill, Another Prong In Agenda-less Republicans’ Faux Outrage Machine." Folks need to remember that all the Republicans' posturing about flag-burning and gay marriage in 2006 didn't help them keep their House and Senate majorities; I don't know that it hurt them that year, since Democrats by and large didn't mention it in their attack ads, but if Democrats run ads about it this year -- in the context of "Democrats ended the pandemic and kick-started the economy while Republicans went after gay kids" -- I believe it will hurt Republicans. We had better not be so sick, immoral, and decadent a society that bad people can continue to be bad without facing any consequences.

Ho hum, idiot Republican says gas prices were lower under Donald Trump in 2020, smart Democrat slams her for saying so. Doing a victory lap over low gas prices in the middle of a pandemic when no one wanted to spend any more money than they absolutely had to would be a little like if Democrats had done victory laps over low gas prices during Barack Obama's first year in office -- they didn't, because those low gas prices were entirely due to the bankster Armageddon of 2008, when, again, nobody wanted to buy anything. Naturally Republicans slammed Mr. Obama when gas prices went back up, citing the entirely useless gas prices of 2009! (The article also reminds us that building Keystone XL would not, in fact, help keep gas prices down, since it wouldn't even be done by now. We know what's causing high gas prices: big oil corporations price-gouging us.)

Also ho hum, Olivia Riggio at FAIR informs us that "Murdoch-Owned Outlets Ignore Their Own Role in Hate Crime Surge." More specifically, Fox News/the New York Post/the Wall Street Journal et al "often spread anti-Asian and antisemitic tropes, while taking no responsibility for the xenophobia that fuels these hate crimes in the first place." Like when Jesse Watters, whose apparent goal in life is to be as big an asshole as his mentor, asked "funny questions" to Chinatown residents or demanded an apology from China over COVID. Or when Dennis Prager, founder of a "university," tells us liberal anti-Zionists, and not white supremacists, cause anti-semitism against Israel. Or when Tucker Carlson drew breath.

PA House Rep./Senate candidate Conor Lamb used to be BFFs with Joe Manchin, but now he's "distancing himself" from the Penguin, saying in fundraising emails that he supports Build Back Better and the Women's Health Protection Act and would end the filibuster if elected to our Senate. They say a public servant ought to keep his finger to the wind, I suppose, but he's also hung onto his big donors, and supporting Build Back Better is very far from the most liberal thing a legislator could do. Has he changed his mind about Medicare-for-All, which also enjoys near-supermajority support in America? Of course not. Sadly, Mr. Lamb might get the nomination, given that John Fetterman and Malcolm Kenyatta are basically vying for the same voters, almost like that's the whole idea.

Finally, this might actually be unqualified good news: scientists may have developed a way to recycle plastic, at room temperature, in a mere 20 minutes. Currently, recycling outfits melt plastic, which has a sort of Xerox effect on the resulting quality, but University of Bath scientists used a zinc/methanol mix to break down commercial BPA beads, and moreover, were able to isolate the notorious bisphenol-A chemical you don't want in your clean water. The mix also broke down several other kinds of industrial plastic. The Bath scientists have only worked on a small amount of plastic, so we don't yet know if state, local, and federal governments or private recycling corporations (which would have a lot more plastic to break down) can use it yet. Still, we a little more hope today than yesterday.

Around the table: the stench of price-gouging is everywhere! And other sad truths.

Somewhat good news, everyone! Our Supreme Court has rejected pleas from Republicans to overturn state Supreme Court-ordered districting maps in both Pennsylvania and North Carolina. While consistent with Justice Alito's refusal to reconsider Pennsylvania state Supreme Court-drawn Congressional map in 2018, it's not good news that four of the nine Justices (including Mr. Alito, of course!) wanted to take the suits, and may want to limit state courts' jurisdiction over legislative redistricting. Even in states which give the courts a role in redistricting by law? I wouldn't put it past them.

Ho hum, gas prices are going up all over America, ostensibly because of Russia, but turns out we only buy 3% of our oil from Russia to begin with! So why are gas prices so high? The economist interviewed in the article makes fairly unconvincing arguments -- if Russia's imports to the Northeast were already down, why are New Jersey gas stations selling gas a few cents above the national average? We learned in 2005 that a state with major oil refineries (in Paulsboro and Elizabeth) shouldn't have that problem. I smell price-gouging here, just as a lot of us do almost everywhere else.

Read Stanislav Markus's explanation of why Russia's oligarchs -- targeted by Western sanctions over Russia's invasion of the Ukraine -- are "a Group of Men Who Won't Be Toppling Putin Anytime Soon" and you'll likely be quite depressed at all the post-Soviet corruption it describes, a matter about which right-wingers have never seemed terribly concerned. The 1990s and 2000s waves of privatization (first of parts of the Soviet state, then of public services) were so irredeemably corrupt it's heartbreaking; this is the same civilization that produced Tolstoy and Chekhov. Anyway, the oligarchs have a lot of money now but no power, by Mr. Putin's design, and the oligarchs who do speak out (Mr. Markus says there'll be more of them) don't play well together.

Idaho state Senate passes an anti-abortion bill modeled on Texas's notorious S.B. 8, though Idaho's bill narrows who can sue -- it specifically allows women who get abortions, the men who impregnated them, and their immediate family members to sue. That difference clearly represents an attempt to circumvent the obvious issue with the Texas law, which is the standing issue, and while I still don't see how a family can have standing to sue over another family member getting an abortion (particularly if they're not parents of a minor!), I can all too easily see the right-wing supermajority on our Supreme Court deciding this (and not the Mississippi or Texas laws) is the back-door abortion ban they've been looking for all their lives.

As I contemplate the way in which the Manhattan District Attorney's investigation into Donald Trump has, in the New York Times's words, "unraveled," I am reminded that rich folks just don't go to prison very often. I've argued with co-workers many times about this -- they see Donald Trump as someone who's so obviously bad at crime that surely anyone with eyes to see can see it. And they're right! He is pretty brazen and awful! But almost anything that happens during the course of an investigation creates an opportunity, and folks with money can exploit those opportunities better than the rest of us can imagine. Cyrus Vance's departure as Manhattan D.A., and his replacement by Alvin Bragg, created just such an opening. We may not learn what happened here until the historians take up the matter.

Finally, ITEP evaluates how much Rick Scott's Get Skinned by the Game plan will cost poorer working families across America. These folks already have "skin in the game" because they pay payroll taxes and Medicare taxes (not to mention state income taxes, property taxes, city wage taxes, and sales taxes), but ITEP's analysis provides even more fodder for Democrat attack ads, if they have the guts to run them. If Democrats were to air ITEP's finding that Mississippi residents could face 50 percent tax hikes under the Scott plan, they might even win a couple of races there. (Hate to pile on, but people's lives are not a "game." Only an irredeemable asshole like Rick Scott would call it a game.)

Action: concerning accountability, Russia, climate change, campaign finance, hunting trophies, and law and order

Long story short: tell our DOJ to investigate and possibly prosecute Donald Trump, tell fossil fuel corporations to abandon their Russian investments, tell our Transportation Department to release a promised climate-change reporting rule, tell state legislators to get private corporation campaign donations out of sheriffs' elections, tell our Fish and Wildlife Service to ban importation of hunting trophies, and tell President Biden to pardon non-violent marijuana offenders. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Common Cause helps you tell our Department of Justice to investigate Donald Trump for attempting to subvert the will of the American people after winning the 2020 election. Late last week House January 6 panel lawyers alleged in a California federal court filing that Donald Trump and several of his allies committed crimes as part of their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and if the January 6 panel has enough evidence to say that, then our Department of Justice has enough reason to hold Mr. Trump accountable. We witnessed a lot of these alleged crimes happening in real time, not just on January 6, of course, but also on January 2, during that alternately begging/threatening phone call to Georgia's Secretary of State. But a lot else happened in the dark, too, which is why we need to shine a light on it.

Sum of Us helps you tell French fossil fuel corporation TotalEnergies to quit investing in Russia, and also to quit fossil fuels. Yeah, it may not do the latter just because we say so, but it's more vulnerable to pressure on the former -- though it stands virtually alone among Western fossil fuel corporations in keeping its investments in Russia, saying that no sanctions have compelled them to divest thus far, and also suggesting that gas drilling is a more "realistic" option for getting off climate change. Set aside the fact that wherever gas drilling wells leak methane, they pack a bigger climate-change punch than coal. Switching to gas is the "reasonable" option only because that's their will to begin with! If they put their capital behind renewables, we'd see a lot more renewable energy right now.

The National Campaign for Transit Justice helps you tell Transportation Secretary Buttigieg to release the Biden Administration rule mandating measurement of climate change emissions from our national highway system. "Measurement," too, not mitigation! We've tried to get mitigation passed during the 2021 battles over the Biden agenda, with limited success. But the Trump Administration overturned this rule while in office because of course they did, while the Biden Administration has announced they'll reinstate it. Thing is, they haven't actually done that, hence our efforts to get more out of them than they've delivered thus far. They really ought to, since it could very well wind up in court one day, which never went well for Mr. Trump.

Color of Change helps you tell your state legislators to get private corporation campaign donations out of county sheriffs' elections. You know how politicians always tell you that campaign donations aren't bribes because they're not quid pro quo transactions and anyway of course you can rely on them to separate what's good for them from what's good for the public? They lie about all of that, of course, but county sheriffs have a much harder time lying all of that when some private prison corporation, or some real estate magnate, or some big telecom corporation, fills their campaign coffers. Gosh, what could these actors possibly want? Like, you know, land for a private prison, more arrests to fill those beds, usurious phone rates for prisoners? Win here, and we can one day win everywhere else.

The Center for Biological Diversity helps you tell our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to ban importing elephant trophies under the authority of the Endangered Species Act. Savanna elephants are endangered in Africa, which is, of course, where hunters go get their trophies, and maybe once upon a time we could argue that we must deploy trophy hunting as a necessary evil in regions where elephant populations have overrun human populations, but that time sure in hell ain't now, not when elephants all over Africa are in danger of disappearing in our lifetimes. And not for nothing, but if you've ever seen an elephant mourn its dead, you sure as hell wouldn't parade around your neighborhood with a bloody tusk shouting look what I did! The more we learn of our world, the more responsible we must be, but hey, civilization ain't easy.

Finally, Progress America helps you tell President Biden to pardon non-violent marijuana offenders. He campaigned on doing that, so he ought to start keeping that promise. There will be right-wingers who will say "you're not supposed to pardon people to further political ends." Go ahead and ask them how they felt about George H.W. Bush pardoning a slew of Iran-Contra participants or Bill Clinton pardoning big campaign donors or Donald Trump pardoning Steve Bannon, because those are all examples of "pardoning people to further political ends." Pardoning folks we shouldn't have jailed to begin with? That's just righting wrongs, which is something civilized people always do. And if folks want to call "righting wrongs" "political," then let them get caught with their cynicism hanging out.

Action: concerning "don't say gay," energy policy, anti-trans policies, and drug prices.

Long story short: tell Florida state legislators to reject the "Don't Say Gay" bill, tell President Biden to sanction Russian oil and gas corporations and invoke the Defense Production Act to build renewable energy infrastructure, tell big corporations to pressure Texas's Governor into rescinding his anti-trans policies, tell our Department of HHS to ensure a key pro-higher drug prices NIH official has as little say as possible about march-in rights for Xtandi, and tell big corporations to stop insuring dirty fossil fuel projects. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

First things first. MoveOn helps you tell Florida state legislators to reject the notorious "Don't Say Gay" bill. The bill no longer requires school officials to tell parents of gay or trans kids that they're gay or trans -- that's a conversation those kids would want to have on their terms, you know, in a free country! -- but the only reason that part of the bill's gone is because good Americans spoke out against it. Shine some light on the rest of the bill, which would criminalize even talking about queer issues in a school setting -- regardless of how relevant it might be to, say, a history or social studies class -- and we might be able to kill it like the vampire upon our culture that it is. (No use telling me that restriction only applies to third-graders and younger, not when Florida educators are going after much older kids as we speak!)

Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to sanction the Russian oil and gas industries, and I quote, "no matter the impact it would have on the price of fossil fuels" here in America. America has suffered from worsening inflation ever since the reactionary U.S. Chamber of Commerce declared "war" on American antitrust enforcers, and you won't have to drive around much to see that gas prices are already going up, again, though, again, to some degree they're hiking prices because they can. Still, I'd prefer higher energy prices to coddling Mr. Putin's favorite fossil fuel corporations. Besides, we can fill the gap in other ways -- like ending stupid sanctions against Venezuela, for example. Or using renewables!

Speaking of which, Stand.Earth helps you tell President Biden to ban fossil fuels from Russia and invoke the Defense Production Act to help manufacture more renewable energy infrastructure. It is a matter of defense, after all -- we would build more renewable energy infrastructure in order to, literally, defend ourselves from Russia using its fossil fuel leverage to browbeat us into submitting to their outrageous invasion of Ukraine, and (as Stand.Earth's email missive points out) will not require Mr. Biden to get permission from One Great And True Real American President Joe Manchin. He'll piss and moan about it, as drama kings tend to do, but ain't everyone sick of that already? I bet most folks are quite sick of it, and need only to be reminded of it. We're not all conscious of all of our feelings at once, after all.

In light of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's latest attempt to pander to the most rage-addled among good Texans -- classifying commonly-accepted health treatments for transgender kids as "child abuse" -- Public Citizen helps you tell Texas's five biggest corporations to lean on Gov. Abbott and tell him to rescind his bass-ackward trans policies. Big corporations need all the good PR they can get, after all! And if right-wingers attack corporate power because it's too "woke," well, we can work with that, too. Greg Abbott enacted his notorious anti-trans policies before his primary; perhaps now that he's won, he can pretend he didn't do it. Let's at least make him earn that, by wielding the Big Stick of Bad PR against the corporations that could actually make him do better.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell HHS Secretary Becerra to make sure National Institutes of Health (or NIH) official Dr. Mark Rorhbaugh recuses himself from any march-in proceedings the Biden Administration initiates over the prostate drug Xtandi. Dr. Rorhbaugh apparently has worked with big pharma lobbyists to sabotage march-in proceedings from within, which isn't his job at our NIH, because in government, you're supposed to serve the people, not the big corporations! This matters because our NIH handles march-in rights proceedings -- that is, those proceedings in which our government mandates a generic version of a drug that its creator charges too much for. And maybe the guy who's actively working against cheaper life-saving drugs shouldn't get to make all the decisions about making cheaper life-saving drugs! Seems reasonable to me.

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell several big insurance corporations to stop funding polluting projects that help exacerbate climate change. Lately the American International Group, better known as AIG, has declared it will stop insuring new tar sands, Arctic drilling, and coal projects, and that's good news, not least because you almost certainly helped that process along if you were part of the public pressure that changed minds at AIG, but other famous big insurance corporations, like Chubb and Liberty Mutual, have not declared any such intention. Well, like I said, big corporations need all the good PR they can get, and they need to avoid the Big Stick of Bad PR as much as they can, so perhaps with a little more public pressure, we can get Chubb and Liberty Mutual to do the right thing.

Around the table: featuring yet another injurious monopoly and a sputtering caravan of whiners.

Matt Stoller relates the evil logic of monopolies to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Long story short: Russia controls so much of the fossil fuel market (gas, oil, even coal) that they can raise prices whenever they want, such that their invasion actually funds itself! Clever, unless you insist, as I do, that cleverness also be useful, and not just to some dictator or other. Do you suppose Facebook will let me say that Russia causes inflation by hiking fuel prices at will? Or is that an even more loaded question than I thought?

The second item in Bess Levin's February 28 news rundown -- to which you should all subscribe if you don't already -- describes Donald Trump taking credit for the fact that Putin's little Ukraine adventure isn't going as well as he'd hoped, because he "insisted" that NATO nations "pay() their dues," although, as Ms. Levin notes, Donald Trump not only didn't do anything worth taking credit for (because he invented the whole dues-paying story to begin with), but did an awful lot of harm to Ukraine, not least in trying to extort its President. You remember, the first thing for which our House impeached him?

Australian scientists, thinking they've developed tracking devices for magpies that are relatively unobtrusive, are surprised to discover the magpies helping each other get the tracking devices off. Thus the magpies not only demonstrate intelligence and problem-solving skills, but altruism, which they previously hadn't demonstrated to researchers, at least not in a way they'd noticed; one wonders what it was about the tracking device that provoked that response. I guess you never do know what'll bring folks together. Right, Vladimir Putin?

U. Aberdeen/U. Cal. Berkeley scientists theorize that our brains smooth out all of the visual noise our eyes receive by, essentially, "perceiv(ing) in a given moment an average of what we saw in the past 15 seconds" as the "illusion" of a "single visual snapshot." Thus whatever we're seeing at a given moment could be up to 15 seconds old. These researchers looked to understand "serial dependence," which describes a phenomenon in which you would "see" an object or person more or less as you've been seeing it for some time, so you don't have to process new information. In any case, I wonder if that's why I occasionally "sense" that a kicker's about to miss a field goal.

If Mitch McConnell is really worried that Rick Scott's "Rescue America" plan "could expose the party to unnecessary attacks this fall," well, I'd have to say that horse has left the barn. And Sen. Scott's walkback is weak: he can't be so cut off from ordinary Americans that he really thinks any of us care about the fine line between Senator-just-saying and Senator-running-party's-campaign-arm, can he? Then again, this is Rick Scott, America's CEO, we're talking about -- last time he talked to regular folk he was probably chewing them out for something that wasn't their fault. Anyway, he's beyond "when you're explaining, you're losing" and well into "when you're in a hole, stop digging." (Of course, Democrats still have to run campaign ads using the information Mr. Scott has so helpfully provided, but that would be like winning, which Democrats generally only do passively. I'd be happy to be wrong!)

Finally, when I hear that the far-right trucking caravan that started in California won't make it to D.C. because it's just not big enough anymore, I must say I'm disappointed. Come on, fellows! Let your freak flag fly! Come and get your humiliation; you've earned it! This couldn't possibly be because our Supreme Court struck down President Biden's vaccine mandate and because our CDC recently recommended that folks in low- or medium-risk areas can go maskless indoors, could it? (Remember: I've said I didn't disagree with the tactics, only with the message, the entirety of which, as far as I can tell, is waaaaaaaaaah.)

Around the table: more thoughts about Ukraine, oil, dark money, and stupid right-wingers.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch reminds us that Vladimir Putin "Has Gambled Everything on His Snap Invasion of Ukraine" but "Now His Political Survival is in Doubt." "So why did Putin do it? Explanations that he has gone mad or plans to rebuild the Soviet Union are propagandistic. More convincing as a reason for him taking this present extraordinary risk is hubris, which is an occupational disease among those who have been too long in power -- 22 years in Putin’s case." I actually thought Russia would roll over Ukraine fairly quickly and then get worn down by years of guerrilla war, but now I'm not even sure Russia will do that well. Even George W. Bush could claim MISHUNZ ACCOMPLISHEDZ!!!!! for a few minutes.

In case you've been caught short by Mr. Putin's claim that his real aim is to fight "neo-Nazis" in Ukraine who practice "genocide," Jeffrey Veidlinger at The Conversation will set you straight. Long story short: Russians have more free speech rights in Ukraine than they do in Russia, and the neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine today have virtually no electoral power. I guess Mr. Putin is hoping you'll remember there were pogroms in Ukraine in the 19th century and that many Ukrainians collaborated with the actual Nazis, but these facts don't exactly make Ukraine unique (and the Ukranian pogrom occurred while it was part of the Russian empire, maybe that's a cautionary tale!). Besides, if Mr. Putin really wants to punish the sin of Nazi collaboration, why isn't he invading Norway or France?

If you've been thinking how refreshing it is that our "liberal" media has learned to hate imperialist wars, Jeff Cohen at Common Dreams will bring you back to Earth with the reminder that our "liberal" media never refer to American imperialism, except in quotation marks meant to be ironic. I'm still a bit puzzled that folks aren't thinking of the Iraq war when they think of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia has deployed 190,000 soldiers to take over a nation of 44 million people living on a little over 600,000 square miles; America deployed 150,000 soldiers to take over a nation of a little over 25.5 million folks living on a bit less than 440,000 square miles. The numbers ain't that different; I guess some Americans just want to forget it all, particularly that part where they called folks like me who opposed the war traitor.

When I heard that nationalizing the fossil fuel industry might be a good way of controlling inflation, I thought, well, with all the corporate welfare they already get, this isn't such a bad idea. We would (per Robert Pollin, who makes a lot of good suggestions in the article) spend about $350 billion buying a controlling interest in the three biggest oil corporations, but that's a one-time cost, of course, and it'll save the taxpayer a lot years down the line! I also remembered that the Trump Administration imposed (and the Biden Administration has, sadly, continued) imposed economy-crippling sanctions on Venezuela essentially because they had the same idea. Does that mean that if we nationalized the oil industry in America, our government would impose sanctions on itself?

You won't be surprised to learn that dark money is funding women's groups opposed to the nomination of Judge Jackson to our Supreme Court. I hope, after all these years of pretending the exception to the rule destroys all rules, we've learned not to devour every perceived irony as if it were manna from heaven. Women against women? Big whoop! The world's a big place, with lots of places for Teh Stupid to hide! I'm about as tired of hearing that right-wing judges always respect "the rule of law" while liberal judges are all "activists." Have they read some of these decisions coming from Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh? If it's not "activist" to ignore precedent, or to go on a fishing expedition for a precedent that fits your conclusion, I don't know what is.

Finally, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) spewed this forth on Twitter this past Sunday: "You millennial leftists who never lived one day under nuclear threat can now reflect upon your woke sky. You made quite a non-binary fuss to save the world from intercontinental ballistic tweets." The rest of the Twittersphere roasted him, but I would like to point out that incoherence is a step up for this guy -- just five years ago, he was a first-term House Rep yelling that we "kill" "all" "radicalized Muslim suspects." To think this dude was a police captain and he still said, out loud, that we should kill suspects! And now he's a Congressdolt. I hope no one uses him as an example of "how people rise on merit in the Republican Party."

Action: concerning sanctions, abortion, drug prices, the war on Yemen, and conservation.

Long story short: tell President Biden to lift sanctions on Venezuela, and tell your Congressfolk to pass the Women's Health Protection Act, lower prescription drug prices, end the war on Yemen, and pass the Recovering America's Wildlife Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

First things first. America's Last Journalist, Greg Palast, reminds us that it we really want to hit Vladimir Putin in the family jewels, we should lift our sanctions on Venezuela, which could produce more cheap oil than Russia ever could if our sanctions weren't crippling them. You can still contact President Biden here; I'd say call him at 1.202.456.1111, but that number only operates between 11 am and 3 pm on Tuesday through Thursday. Did Venezuela invade someone to get sanctioned by our government? Of course not -- we're sanctioning them for wanting to nationalize their oil and levy taxes against big oil corporations, which they have the right to do, being a democracy and all. Yes, they are a democracy; can we say as much about Russia, let alone the numerous other nations we enable? So let's tighten our grip around Mr. Putin's neck and correct a serious injustice in one fell swoop.

Our Senate votes today on H.R. 3755/S. 1975, the Women's Health Protection Act, so Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass this bill. If you call your Senators, and you know you're calling one who'll likely vote against the bill, all you need do is list the good things the bill would do, such that they would be compelled to answer: yes, I want clinics to dispense harmful information just to lead women away from getting abortions, and yes, I want forced ultrasounds on all pregnant women, and yes, I want abortion clinics to adhere to absurdly-high standards just so most of them close, and no, I don't want women to be able to get abortions even if their pregnancies threaten their lives. Seriously, let's make them put it like that.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices. 80% of Americans want Medicare to be able to negotiate drug prices, just so drug prices can be lower for everyone, and even Newt Gingrich says if 70% of Americans want something they should have it, but because Kyrsten Sinema and Bob Menendez don't want it -- two people -- we can't have it, even though one in three Americans are currently rationing their medicines because they really can't afford them. That includes one in four Americans rationing insulin, though insulin is literally a life-saving drug. So this isn't just about doing the will of the American people, it's also about fucking saving lives. Sorry, these Senator Galaxybrains bring out the cuss words.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a War Powers Resolution that would end our involvement in the Saudi/UAE war on Yemen. Remember when Donald Trump would conduct a "different" kind of foreign policy? Well, he didn't stop our involvement in the war that's driving a nation to famine and killing some of the best counter-terrorists on Earth, so you know that was a lie. And remember when Joe Biden said he'd be ending military support for the war? That's still going on, sadly, so you know that was a lie. A War Powers Resolution would at least take back (and use!) the power that Congress should never have delegated to Presidents (including Barack Obama, you didn't think he was off the hook, did you?) to begin with.

Finally, Penn Environment helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 2773/S. 2372, the Recovering America's Wildlife Act. What would this bill do? It would fund our most pressing wildlife conservation efforts, and it would draw that funding from the folks who violate our clean air and clean water laws and pay fees and fines because of it. The Senate version of this bill, you may notice, has an equal number of Democratic and Republican sponsors at this writing (16 of each); even the House version counts 37 Republicans among its 164 sponsors. Presumably Republican politicians support this bill because it lets states dictate which are our most pressing wildlife conservation needs; I might do it differently, but I wouldn't let the perfect murder the good, either. So let's get this done.

Action: concerning rape, pollution, taxes, and law and order.

Long story short: tell Honduras to sign a bill allowing rape victims to access emergency contraceptives, tell Chile to start regulating the clothing industry, tell New York's Governor to extend clemency to Robert Webster, tell President Biden to end offshore drilling, tell our IRS to simplify free tax filing, and tell our Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for the January 6 attempted coup. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Avaaz helps you tell Honduran President Xiomara Castro (Honduras's first female President) to sign a bill that would repeal Honduras's ban on emergency contraception. She's under a lot of pressure not to sign the bill, and you can guess how that pressure reveals itself: "this is too risky a move for a President not even a month into her term," "the first female President shouldn't appear to be too friendly to women," "don't you know we only outlawed the killing of women in 2013 and we barely prosecute it?" But right is right and wrong is wrong, and you know what's wrong? Raping 12-year-old girls and demanding they carry any resulting pregnancies to term, that's what. And that happens in Honduras all the time. Good Hondurans bear the primary responsibility for getting their President to do their will, but nothing prevents us from helping out.

Sum of Us helps you tell Chilean President Gabriel Boric to stop allowing big clothing corporations to use Chile as a dumping ground. You've heard of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," a massive floating island of plastic trash now three times as large as France floating in the Pacific? Now acquaint yourself with the mountain of clothes growing in the Atacama Desert, made up of clothes manufactured largely in Asia, unsold in Europe and America, and dumped as trash in Chile. Ugly, to be sure, but you may not be convinced that this is a big deal, particularly for a new President who, having declared that "(n)eoliberalism was born in Chile, and here it will die," might be looking for bigger fish. But nobody wants their country used as someone else's trashcan. Indeed, Mr. Boric may owe his election to that sentiment.

Change.org helps you tell New York Gov. Hochul to free Robert Webster, currently serving a 50-year sentence for arson. You'll recognize most of this story -- a conviction based entirely on witness testimony, exculpating evidence not fully explored at trial, a judge failing to account for Mr. Websters' status as a minor during sentencing -- but you may also be wondering: half a century for arson? The arson's aftermath involved a police officer's murder, which may have induced a longer sentence for Mr. Webster -- a much longer sentence than the one given for the police officer's murder, if you can believe it. Has Mr. Webster been even better than a model prisoner despite spending two-thirds of his life in prison? Yes, he has. So let's help him out.

The National Resources Defense Council helps you tell President Biden to end offshore drilling. The Administration has just started leasing a million acres off Alaska's Cook Inlet for gas and oil drilling, and I've recited the problems with Arctic drilling enough over the years -- oh, hell, one more time: oil spills are even harder to clean up in the Arctic's frigid waters, we know little enough about the Arctic ecosystem that we don't know all the harm drilling would do, and fishing is a big industry in Alaska that would be endangered by the inevitable oil spill. A federal court stopped the Biden Administration's big Gulf of Mexico leasing plan, but the Administration ought to see the writing on the wall by now, not just in court, but in a warming world where other, more renewable technologies can shoulder more of our energy burden.

Public Citizen helps you tell our IRS to implement free tax filing for good Americans who have relatively easy tax filing to do, which is most of us. Our laws already authorize our IRS to do this! And if you have relatively straightforward tax issues, our IRS already has all the information it needs to fill our your damn tax return for you! I suppose the objection would be that "tax-filing is a big business in America," but if a big chunk of that business doesn't need it, does that business deserve to be so big? Of course not! That business will have plenty of work for folks with complex investments and the like. But charging folks hundreds of dollars every year for doing work they don't need to do? That's profoundly wasteful, and our economy shouldn't churn money from waste.

Finally, Common Cause helps you tell our Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for his actions leading up to the January 6 attempted coup. We have lately learned that Mr. Trump was already preparing to fight a 2020 election loss in court three months before Election Day, and while I'm sure his votaries call that "being prepared," it also means folks like John Eastman (who wrote the infamous memo laying out how Mike Pence could have invalidated 2020 election results on January 6) and Cleta Mitchell (who participated in Mr. Trump's infamous "find 11,780 votes" call to Georgia's Secretary of State) might have more to tell, since they advised these legal efforts from the start. And look, we all know he would have done anything to win; now we need only know what laws he might have broken.

Action: concerning health care, monopolies, pollution, and bad cable news channels.

Long story short: tell President Biden to lower prescription drug prices, tell our government to reject a big bankster merger, tell our EPA to ban the herbicide dicamba and require more electric heavy-duty trucks on the road, tell our government to stop flogging "carbon capture" as a climate-change solution, and tell cable corporations to stop carrying the Fox News Channel. Use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs to communicate your will.

Social Security Works helps you tell President Biden to use his lawful power to lower prescription drug prices. After all, certain Congressdolts said "no" to Medicare negotiating drug prices, and in a Congress with slim margins a few miscreants can always get their way, so let's stop trying to negotiate with them and let's start trying to get President Biden to do the right thing. Specifically, the above-linked petition helps you ask President Biden to use "march-in" rights, granted by the Bayh/Dole Act of 1980, to manufacture cheaper generic drugs. At least 80% of Americans supported Medicare drug price negotiation, and I bet 100% of Americans oppose price-gouging and live-saving medicines breaking their bank accounts, so I would hope Mr. Biden would feel fairly secure in taking action the people need and want. Boy, I'd hate to be wrong about that.

Daily Kos helps you tell our Federal Reserve Bank and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (or OCC) to reject a proposed U.S. Bank/Union Bank merger. Never heard of either one? Well, let's keep it that way! And, in fact, let's break up both those banks so the resulting banks will be even less famous! Fame might be a good reason to buy a book, but it's no reason to choose a bank. And once upon a time, you had a savings and/or checking account at a bank that only had one branch, and because this bank only had one branch, the folks who worked there knew the folks living nearby and could tailor their services to those good folks. Now, big banks expect you to tailor your needs to them. And you deserve better than that! So let's fight this merger.

Penn PIRG helps you tell our Environmental Protection Agency (or EPA) to ban herbicide dicamba from use on our farms. Dicamba has wreaked enough havoc on farms that don't use it -- it's a notorious drifter! -- that even Republican politicians have restricted its use, but the 2021 growing season saw no less disturbance and disruption than previous growing seasons, which means using it at all threatens farms everywhere. Monsanto figures in this story, of course, first by manufacturing a "better" version of dicamba a few years back and then offering dicamba-resistant crops as a "solution." But these are not solutions to those of us who do not worship mammon! We should treat food as a right rather than a thing to be sold; in the meantime, let's get dangerous chemicals off our farms.

Hip Hop Caucus helps you tell our EPA to start strengthening emissions standards for heavy-duty shipping trucks, with the goal of getting them all electric. Right-wingers will look solely at the goal and say pie in the sky much, liberal? Ha ha ha snort! But no reasonable person says that! Everyone knows it takes time to get internal combustion engines out of commercial trucks, but the need is no less urgent: these trucks comprise about a quarter of all carbon emissions in America, meaning that getting them to pollute less would be, as a famous philosopher once said, a BFD. And not for nothing, but highways more likely run through Black and Brown neighborhoods, exposing those folks to more pollutants than the rest of us. Why, it was almost like that was the whole idea! But we can do better.

Stand.Earth helps you tell our government to stop giving corporate welfare handouts to "carbon capture" corporations. Only when we embrace solar power, electric cars, geothermal heating, and hydroponic farming will we slow our roll toward climate disaster; "solutions" like natural gas, nuclear power, and "carbon capture," where corporations capture the carbon emissions before they hit the air and either store them in the ground or reuse them for other purposes, might make some executive rich, but they won't help us keep our planet. Carbon capture, it turns out, is nowhere near as far along in its development as it would have to be, plus corporations use a lot of the carbon they do capture to dig for oil! What a way of telling good people all over the world to fuck off and die! If you take as kindly to that as I do, give your government what-for.

Finally, Inequality Media Civic Action helps you tell big telecom corporations to stop offering Fox News on their networks. We've made some headway starving the beast that is the One America News Network, but going after Fox News, now the number one source of right-wing rage for over two decades, will, I expect, be harder, even though I presume most of its viewers will find other, better things to obsess about once they can't easily get to Fox News. Now, some folks don't like to do things like this; they call them censorship. But governments censor; when consumers band together against a product they don't like, that's just the churn of civilization. Why, some folks would even call it the free market in action!